An Automated Impact Analysis Approach for Test Cases based on Changes of Use Case based Requirement Specifications

Abstract

Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is essential to the software development process that identifies the potential effects of changes during the development process. The changing of requirements always impacts on the software testing because some parts of the existing test cases may not be used to test the software. This affects new test cases to be entirely generated from the changed version of software requirements specification that causes a considerable amount of time and effort to generate new test cases to re-test the modified system. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel automatic impact analysis approach of test cases based on changes of use case based requirement specification. This approach enables a framework and CIA algorithm where the impact of test cases is analysed when the requirement specification is changed. To detect the change, two versions as before-change and after-change of the use case model are compared. Consequently, the patterns representing the cause of variable changes are classified and analysed. This results in the existing test cases to be analysed whether they are completely reused, partly updated as well as additionally generated. The new test cases are generated automatically by using the Combination of Equivalence and Classification Tree Method (CCTM). This benefits the level of testing coverage with a minimised number of test cases to be enabled and the redundant test cases to be eliminated. The automation of this approach is demonstrated with the developed prototype tool. The validation and evaluation result with two real case studies from Hospital Information System (HIS) together with perspective views of practical specialists confirms the contribution of this tool that we seek.Keywords-Change impact analysis approach; test case; blackbox testing; use case based requirement specification; combination of equivalence and classification tree method

An Approach of Test Case Generation with Software Requirement Ontology

“…• CCTM test case generation technique implemented in the framework to construct test cases influences benefits that the number of test cases is reduced with maximizing testing coverage. As claimed in [14] [15] we have discovered from our implemented experiences that CTM technique in CCTM enables the redundant test cases to be eliminated, On the other hand, ECP technique in CCTM expands the possible range value both valid and invalid cases. This led to the testing coverage to be increased.…”

“…One is a Library Management System (LMS) deployed in Prince of Songkhla University, Phuket. The other is Kidney Failure Diagnosis (KFD) subsystem from Hospital Information System (HIS) replicated from [15]. The following sections describe the case study information together with the demonstration of how our approach manually works.…”

“…The GFR and Urine Creatinine (UO) results are paired to interpret the stage of kidney failure. This case study is based on [15]. It is an open-source system and is part of the Hospital Information System called HospitalOS 3 .…”

“…Therefore, in our previous work [13], we presented how ontology engineering approach can enhance practical software testing. We proposed a conceptual vision of framework called ReqOntoTestGen (Requirement Ontology Testcase Generation) that combines the benefit of ontology to represent the semantics of requirement specification with Control Natural Language (CNL) and Classification Tree Method (CCTM) [14] [15] testing technique to generate test cases. The ROO (Rabbit to OWL Ontology Authoring) tool [16] is used by this framework to design and develop an ontology with CNL or Rabbit Language.…”