Test Sequence Validation and Generation using Classification Trees
H. Schooljan · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2013
It has become very tedious to specify test cases for software artifacts in a consistent way, due to high complexity of the system under test. In order to help testers design these test cases more efficiently, tool support has been created in the form of CTE XL Professional to make people able to specify, validate and also generate test cases in a user-friendly way through the use of classification trees. This thesis project explores techniques for generating and validating sequences of dependent test steps using classification trees, which can only be done manually in the current support tools. We also describe the development process of a prototype plugin for CTE XL Professional for Berner & Mattner Systemtechnik GmbH, which is used to evaluate the test sequence generation process in a practical environment and as a contribution toward inclusion into a future CTE XL release. We find that exhaustive test sequence generation through the construction of a complete tree of possible test paths is only feasible for very small systems because of time complexity problems, and is only usable for achieving high transition coverage. Simple pseudorandom heuristic test sequence generation methods provide more diverse test sequence sets, however to achieve high test coverage more research is needed on more advanced heuristic algorithms.