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Requirement-Based Testing - Extracting Logical Test Cases from Requirement Documents

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Software Quality: Methods and Tools for Better Software and Systems (SWQD 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 302))

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Abstract

Much has been written on the subject of model-based testing, i.e. taking the test cases from the system model. The prerequisite to that is that the testers have access to a design model, preferably in UML. Less has been published on the subject of requirement-based testing, i.e. taking the test cases directly from the requirement document, which is usually some structured text. Model-based testing has, to a certain extent, already been automated. Tools process the model XMI schema to extract logical test cases or test conditions as they are referred to in the ISO Standard-29119. There has yet to be any tools to extract test cases from requirement documents since this entails natural language processing and presupposes the marking up of the documents. The author began his research in this field already in 2003 while working as tester in a large scale financial services project in Vienna. There he was able to generate several thousand logical test cases and store them in the project test case database. His first internationally published paper on the subject was at the QSIC Conference in 2007. Since then he has published another five papers on the subject, alone and with others. At the heart of this approach is a text analysis tool named TestSpec which processes both English and German language requirement texts. The tool has been used in several projects to set up a logical test case database and to determine the extent of the planned system test. By counting the number of test conditions contained in the requirements text, it is possible to better estimate test effort. In all cases it proves to be helpful to testers in recognizing and defining test cases. It saves the effort involved in manually scanning through large text documents often containing several hundred pages in search of features to be tested. What used to take many days can now be done within a few minutes with the help of the tool. Not only that, but the tool also generates a test plan and a test specification in accordance with the ISO/IEEE standard. In this paper the automated approach to extracting test conditions from natural language text is explained and how it is implemented by the tool. In this praxis-oriented paper four test projects are cited which deal with very different types of requirement documents.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Harry M. Sneed

  2. SoRing Kft., Budapest, Hungary

    Harry M. Sneed

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  1. Harry M. Sneed
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Correspondence to Harry M. Sneed .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Winkler

  2. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  3. Software Quality Lab GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Johannes Bergsmann

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Sneed, H.M. (2018). Requirement-Based Testing - Extracting Logical Test Cases from Requirement Documents. In: Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Bergsmann, J. (eds) Software Quality: Methods and Tools for Better Software and Systems. SWQD 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 302. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71440-0_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71440-0_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71439-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71440-0

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