Assessing, comparing, and combining statechart-based testing and structural testing: An experiment

Although models have been proven to be helpful in a number of software engineering activities there is still significant resistance to model-driven development. This paper investigates one specific aspect of this larger problem. It addresses the impact of using statecharts for testing class clusters that exhibit a state-dependent behavior. More precisely, it reports on a controlled experiment that investigates their impact on testing fault-detection effectiveness. Code-based, structural testing is compared to statechart-based testing and their combination is investigated to determine whether they are complementary. Results show that there is no significant difference between the fault detection effectiveness of the two test strategies but that they are significantly more effective when combined. This implies that a cost-effective strategy would specify statechart-based test cases early on, execute them once the source code is available, and then complete them with test cases based on code coverage analysis.