A systematic approach to automatically generate test scenarios from UML activity diagrams

Test scenarios are frequently used in scenario-based software testing. However, generation of the test scenarios is usually a manual and labor-intensive task. It is often desired that test scenarios can be automatically generated. As a semi-formal modeling language, UML is widely used in both academia research and industry practice to describe analysis and design specifications. The UML activity diagrams (ADs) are mainly used in business logic processing at the early stage of software development life-cycle. Obviously, testing scenarios generated from ADs can contribute to test driven development. Nevertheless, it is difficult to automatically generate test scenarios from ADs which contains fork-join pairs mixed with loops and branches. In this paper, a systematic approach is proposed to automatically generate test scenarios from the UML activity diagrams which may contain complicated fork-join structure.

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