A Goal-Oriented Software Testing Methodology Technical Report

Goal-oriented requirements engineering methodologies have been investigated for more than a decade, aiming at better supporting requirements engineering. They help elicit users’ requirements, deal with stakeholders’ goals and strategic dependencies among them. Moreover, they allow representing alternative solutions so that stakeholders and developers can negotiate and choose the one that meets their business demands. Some methodologies offer specification-based formal verification, allowing software developers to correct errors at the beginning of the development process. However, a structured testing process for goaloriented methodologies that complements formal verification is still missing. In this report, we introduce a novel methodology for goal-oriented software testing. It specifies a testing model that complements the goaloriented methodology Tropos and strengthens the mutual relationship between goal analysis and testing. Furthermore, it provides a systematic way of deriving test cases from goal analysis. To support the proposed methodology, a testing framework was integrated into an existing tool (TAOM4E) that supports Tropos.