A Scenario-Based Approach to Validating and Testing Software Systems Using Statecharts

Abstract

Scenarios (Use cases) are used to describe the functionality and behavior of a (software) system in a user-centered perspective. As scenarios form a kind of abstract level test cases for the system under development, the idea to use them to derive test cases for system test is quite intriguing. Yet in practice scenarios from the analysis phase are seldom used to create concrete system test cases. In this paper we present a procedure to create scenarios in the analysis phase and use those scenarios in system test to systematically determine test cases. This is done by formalization of scenarios into statecharts, annotation of statecharts with helpful information for test case creation/generation and by path traversal in the statecharts to determine concrete test cases.