Ontology-based Software Test Case Generation (OSTAG)

Testing is a paramount quality assurance activity in every software developmentproject, especially for embedded, safety critical systems. During thetest process, a lot of effort is put into the generation of test cases. The presentedOSTAG project aimed at developing methods and techniques to automate thesoftware test case generation for black-box testing. The proposed approach wasbased on the creation of a software requirements ontology and the applicationof inference rules on the ontology to derive test cases. The ontology representsknowledge of the requirements, the software system and the corresponding applicationdomain while the inference rules formalize knowledge from documentsand experienced testers in the domain of test planning and test case generation.A software prototype of the approach was implemented and one of the industrialproject partners evaluated the results. An alternative method for generating testcases, based on genetic algorithms, was also explored