An Approach for Multi-Artifact Testing Through an Ontological Perspective for Behavior-Driven Development

Abstract

Abstract. In a user-centered development process, artifacts evolve in iterative cycles until they meet users' requirements and then become the final product. Every cycle gives the opportunity to revise the design and to introduce new requirements which might affect the specification of artifacts that have been set in former development phases. Testing the consistency of multiple artifacts used to develop interactive systems every time that new requirements are introduced is a cumbersome activity, especially if it is done manually. This paper proposes an approach based on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to support the automated assessment of artifacts along the development process of interactive systems. The paper uses an ontology for specifying tests that can run over multiple artifacts sharing similar concepts. A case study testing Task Models, Prototypes, and Final User Interfaces is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach from the early phases of the design process, providing a continuous quality assurance of requirements, and helping clients and development teams to identify potential problems and inconsistencies before commitments with software implementation are made.

Ensuring the Consistency between User Requirements and Task Models: A Behavior-Based Automated Approach

“…The approach has also been extended and adapted to assess other early artifacts such as GUI prototypes and late artifacts such as final GUIs [39], [34], [37], [36], [40]. As an integrated approach, the same set of BDD stories is assigned to automatically assess task models, GUI prototypes in different levels of abstraction, and final GUIs, ensuring a consistent verification, validation and testing (VV&T) approach for interactive systems with high availability of tests and instantaneous feedback about the consistency of artifacts regarding the user requirements.…”

Evaluating the usage of predefined interactive behaviors for writing user stories: an empirical study with potential product owners

“…The results presented in this article have also supported the development of a broader approach aiming at automating the assessment of user interface design artifacts based on the user requirements expressed in the User Stories. This approach has been previously published by us (Silva, 2016;Silva and Winckler, 2016, Silva, Hak and Winckler, 2016b, 2016a and so far has been used to assess user interface design artifacts.…”