A comfortable testplayer for analyzing statistical usage testing strategies

Abstract

We will first give a brief introduction to a versatile modeling environment that allows the early validation of system specifications by a test-driven agile simulation approach. The main focus of our paper is on providing techniques for automated test case generation relying on statistical usage models. Based on the open source software R for statistical computing and graphics the easy to handle test case generation and analyzing TestPlayer c tool was developped. Starting from customer-specific graphical Markov chain usage models test cases are automatically generated and visualized by highlighting selected nodes and arcs in the model. In addition, various metrics and corresponding diagrams offer analytical techniques to assess the quality of the derived test suite.

Veritas - a versatile modeling environment for test-driven agile simulation

“…The combination of different, dedicated tools within a common Eclipse-RCP environment provides an integrated support for quality-assurance processes and opens new perspectives for the versatile usage independent of specific application domains. Due to Eclipse it is very easy to substitute specific tools in the VeriTAS tool chain and to provide extensions and additional features with respect to more concrete issues and questions (Dulz 2011).…”

“…Because exhaustive testing of real systems is infeasible in practice an appropriate set of test cases must be provided for accomplishing a given test goal. In contrast to other testing techniques, the statistical testing approach benefits from usage driven testing based on a set of statistically sampled test cases (Dulz andZhen 2003, Prowell 2005). Statistical testing relies on a Markov chain usage model (Walton, Poore, and Trammell 1995;Whittaker and Thomason 1994) that characterizes the possible uses of given software in its intended environment and consists of usage states and transitions between these states.…”