Deriving Tailored UML Interaction Models from Scenario-Based Runtime Tests

Documenting system behavior explicitly using graphical models (e.g. UML activity or sequence diagrams) facilitates communication about and understanding of software systems during development and maintenance tasks. Creating graphical models manually is a time-consuming and often error-prone task. Deriving models from system-execution traces, however, suffers from resulting model sizes which render the models unmanageable for humans. This paper describes an approach for deriving behavior documentation from runtime tests in terms of UML interaction models. Key to our approach is leveraging the structure of scenario-based runtime tests to render the resulting interaction models and diagrams tailorable by humans for a given task. Each derived model represents a particular view on the test-execution trace. This way, one can benefit from tailored graphical models while controlling the model size. The approach builds on conceptual mappings (transformation rules) between a test-execution trace metamodel and the UML2 metamodel. In addition, we provide means to turn selected details of test specifications and of testing environment (i.e. test parts and call scopes) into views on the test-execution trace (scenario-test viewpoint). A prototype implementation called KaleidoScope based on a software-testing framework (STORM) and model transformations (Eclipse M2M/QVTo) is available.

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