Bridging the gap between requirements and aspect state machines to support non-functional testing: Industrial case studies

Abstract

Requirements are often structured and documented as use cases while UML state machine diagrams often describe the behavior of a system. State machines capture rich and detailed behavior of a system, which can serve as a basis for many automated activities such as automated test case and code generation. The former is of interest in this paper. Non-functional behavior can be modeled using standard UML state machines, but usually results in complex state machines. To cope with such complexity, Aspect-Oriented Modeling (AOM) is often recommended. AspectSM is a UML profile defined to model crosscutting behavior on UML state machines called as aspect state machines with the focus of supporting model-based test case generation for non-functional behavior. Hence, an automatic transition from use cases to aspect state machines would provide significant, practical help for testing system requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach to automatically generate aspect state machines from use cases for the purpose of non-functional testing. Our approach is implemented in a tool, which we used for two industrial case studies. Results show that high quality aspect state machines can be generated, which can be manually refined at a reasonable cost to support testing. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.