The Compliance Testing of Software Tools with respect to the UML standards specification - the ArgoUML case study

In ICSE'08 we demonstrated the Java UML Lightweight Enumerator (JULE) tool, which supports compliance test generation from modeling standards specifications. When employed in our framework for software tool certification, JULE provides a powerful technology to enumerate a set of test cases that exhaustively test a modeling tool. JULE avoids combinatorial explosion by generating lest cases only up to non-isomorphism. In this paper, a case study presented is an experiment on the use of a test suite generated from JULE to assess the compliance of an open source software tool - ArgoUML This case study illustrates how ArgoUML is tested and reveals some previously unknown non-compliance issues. The case study highlights how software modeling tools can be tested for standards compliance and how test results can be analyzed to diagnose the causes of noncompliance in a software tool.