Application of Inference Rules to a Software Requirements Ontology to Generate Software Test Cases

Testing of a software system is resource-consuming activity. One of the promising ways to improve the efficiency of the software testing process is to use ontologies for testing. This paper presents an approach to test case generation based on the use of an ontology and inference rules. The ontology represents requirements from a software requirements specification, and additional knowledge about components of the software system under development. The inference rules describe strategies for deriving test cases from the ontology. The inference rules are constructed based on the examination of the existing test documentation and acquisition of knowledge from experienced software testers. The inference rules are implemented in Prolog and applied to the ontology that is translated from OWL functional-style syntax to Prolog syntax. The first experiments with the implementation showed that it was possible to generate test cases with the same level of detail as the existing, manually produced, test cases.