A Conceptual Metamodel to Bridging Requirement Patterns to Test Patterns

Requirement patterns represent an abstraction of an application's behaviors and services that, in turn, may be replicated in similar applications. However, there has been a lack of efforts exploiting the benefits of requirement patterns in other phases of the software development life cycle, besides the requirements engineering itself. To address this gap, we propose the Software Pattern MetaModel (SoPaMM) that bridges requirement patterns to groups of scenarios with similar behaviors in the form of test patterns. SoPaMM allows the description of the behavior of a requirement pattern through a time executable and easy-to-use language aiming at the automatic generation of test patterns. Using SoPaMM, we model and implement a behavior-driven functional requirement pattern for a web-based user authentication application. Our preliminary results point out that a requirement pattern can be an executable specification capable of generating automated tests.