Supporting Test Code Generation with an Easy to Understand Business Rule Language

Work done with Ingolstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany. Copyright held by authors. URL for accessing the journal issue's contents: http://www.iariajournals.org/software/ . This is an extended version of the earlier publication "Automated test code generation based on formalized natural language business rules" presented at the Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering Advances (ICSEA 2012).The paper addresses two fundamental problems in requirements engineering: The first one is the conflict between understandability for non-programmers and a semantically well-founded representation of business rules. The second one is the verification of productive code against business rules in requirements documents. As a solution, a language to specify business rules that are close to natural language and at the same time formal enough to be processed by computers is introduced. A case study with 30 test persons indicates that the proposed language caters to a better understandability for domain experts. For more domain specific expressiveness, the language framework permits the definition of basic language statements. The language also defines business rules as atomic formulas, that are frequently used in practice. This kind of constraints is also called common constraints. Each atomic formula has a precise semantics by means of predicate or Interval Temporal Logic. The customization feature is demonstrated by an example from the logistics domain. Behavioral business rule statements are specified for this domain and automatically translated to an executable representation of Interval Temporal Logic. Subsequently, the verification of requirements by automated test generation is shown. Thus, our framework contributes to an integrated software development process by providing the mechanisms for a human and machine readable specification of business rules and for a direct reuse of such formalized business rules for test cases