Automated support for deriving test requirements from UML statecharts

Many statechart-based testing strategies result in specifying a set of paths to be executed through a (flattened) statechart. These techniques can usually be easily automated so that the tester does not have to go through the tedious procedure of deriving paths manually to comply with a coverage criterion. The next step is then to take each test path individually and derive test requirements leading to fully specified test cases. This requires that we determine the system state required for each event/transition that is part of the path to be tested and the input parameter values for all events and actions associated with the transitions. We propose here a methodology towards the automation of this procedure, which is based on a careful normalization and analysis of operation contracts and transition guards written with the Object Constraint Language (OCL). It is illustrated by one case study that exemplifies the steps of our methodology and provides a first evaluation of its applicability.