Test Cases Generation for Object-oriented Software from Decision Slicing of UML Activity Diagram

Software testing is an integral part of the software development life cycle. Design of good test cases is a key challenge in software testing. Test cases can be designed from different artifacts like requirements, design and software code. In Software engineering, different UML diagrams are used for designing and analysis of the software systems. The main contribution of this work is to propose a novel technique of test cases generation from UML activity diagram using an iterative method. Iterative methods are used in numerical analysis for generation of solution of equation iteratively. In the present work a test cases generation technique from decision slicing of UML activity diagram is presented. Decision slices for each decision nodes are derived from the Activity Flow Graph (AFG) of the activity diagram. Test cases are generated for each activity path of the activity flow graph. Decision nodes at each activity path are used to generate system of equations and these equations are solved by an iterative method to generate test data for each activity path. A case study of ticket purchasing from ticket vending machine using UML activity diagram is presented.