A Use Case Driven Testing Process: Towards a Formal Approach Based on UML Collaboration Diagrams

Abstract

Dynamic interactions between a group of objects, for the realization of a use case or a complex operation of an object, may be specified by using UML collaboration diagrams. Collaboration defines the roles a group of objects play when performing a particular task and several aspects of the control related to their interactions. The specification described in a collaboration diagram must be preserved during the transformation process into an implementation. Test generation based upon collaboration diagrams is actually a poorly exploited approach. The testing methodology (generation and verification) proposed in this paper is based on the dynamic interactions between objects and takes into account several aspects related to their control. It supports an incremental verification of the implementation of the use cases. The generated sequences correspond to the different scenarios of the use cases, expected during the analysis and design phases. They allow verifying whether the implementation of each use case is in accordance with the corresponding specification. We also present in this paper a brief summary of the environment that we developed for supporting the proposed use case driven testing process.