Reconciling offshore outsourcing with model based testing

Abstract

In the context of offshore outsourcing, in order to validate the requirements of a stakeholder (the contractor) against the actual behavior of an implementation under test (IUT) developed by the contracted, it is necessary to have a requirement specification language from which test cases can be generated and executed on an actual IUT. Code-based testing tools are limited to unit testing and do not tackle validation per se. Conversely, model-based testing tools support the derivation of test cases from a requirements model. But such test cases are not necessarily executable and those tools that claim 'test execution' in fact offer symbolic execution, which is carried out using a model of the IUT, not the actual IUT. Here, we overview a requirements specification language and its corresponding fully implemented framework, that support the validation of IUT-independent requirements against actual IUT behavior, as required by offshore outsourcing. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.