Acceptance tests generation from U2TP models for web applications

A utilização desta abordagem no ciclo de desenvolvimento de uma aplicação web traz algumas vantagens, como ser necessário gerar manualmente apenas o modelo de comportamento de cada funcionalidade da aplicação, (pois os demais artefatos são gerados automaticamente), consumindo menos tempo e estando menos sujeitos a erros, além de prevenir diferentes interpretações dos requisitos pelos stakeholders, desenvolvedores e testadores. O tempo despendido na especificação dos modelos é compensado pelo tempo economizado com a geração dos cenários e do código de testes.The testing activity throughout software development is fundamental to the pursuit of software quality and reliability, finding faults to be removed. However, despite its importance, software testing is often an underutilized phase in software development. Moreover, tests are proved to be expensive, difficult and problematic when not done in the appropriate way. A new paradigm for software testing is model-driven testing (MDT), which can be defined as software testing where test cases are derived from a model that describes some aspects of the system being tested, such as behavior, for example. This description, often using UML diagrams and/or its profiles, can be processed to produce a set of test cases. Software specifications based on usage scenarios expressed by appropriate UML diagrams are considered significant and effective, because they describe the system’s requirements from an intuitive and visual perspective. Thus, they can be used for the description of acceptance tests, which validate that the system meets user requirements. These specifications also facilitate the automation of this kind of test. Test automation can decrease time spent on testing, thereby reducing the cost of this activity. Thus, this work proposes an approach for automated generation of acceptance tests from U2TP (the UML 2.0 test profile) diagrams for web applications, based on behavior driven development (BDD) paradigm, obtaining acceptance scenarios and executable test code supported by an acceptance testing automation framework. This approach was applied on an actual development environment, by means of an experiment. Using this approach in an web application development cycle has some advantages, such as being required only to manually generate the model of behavior of each application functionality (because other artifacts are generated automatically), thus being less time consuming and less prone to errors, and preventing different interpretations of requirements by stakeholders, developers and testers. The time spent at the models’ specification is compensated by the time saved with the generation of scenarios and test code