An approach to generate test goals from use case scenarios

Scenarios are used to describe the functionality and behavior of a system. Scenarios are an important mechanism for requirements specification and can be used to generate test goals at requirements analysis level. By using scenarios in system testing, we are able to start testing at very early stage of software development. By eliminating model defects before the coding begins and the test case creation results in significant cost savings and higher quality code because later the defects captured are more costly in term of effort and time. Current approaches for system testing are using a use cases scenario which involves functional details that seem to be difficult at very initial level of software development. In this study, an approach is proposed for system testing directly derived from the specification without involving functional details. Pre and post conditions to use cases are utilized a guard that enables the generation of formalized test cases; also contracts are added to each level that makes it possible to generate test cases for each flow of the system. The contribution of this study is to provide an approach for testing software system that not only helps in starting testing at early stages of software development, but also provides a mechanism to elaborate and refine the specifications. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.