A Graphical Tool for Test Generation from State Models

Abstract

This paper presented a graphical tool for generating test cases based on state models. The tool provides users with a user-friendly model editor to create their state model in a tree view structure. The tree based state model can then be saved to a disk in the form of an xml file and any existing model file can be loaded back into the tool. Two different traverse algorithms are explored by this tool, state based coverage and transition based coverage. The tool implements both algorithms and is capable of generating test paths based on different traversal algorithms. The tool also provides a code generation process that walks through these test paths and generates test cases in any one of the supported .NET based programming languages specified by the user. Lastly, the tool can generate a Visual Studio compatible model file based on the same state model created by the user. This model serves as a good visual representation of the state model created by the user in the model editor. The same state model is represented in three different forms, tree based state model in model editor, xml based state model in an xml file and graphical based state model in Visual Studio. An example is used to demonstrate the usage of this tool and the algorithms used behind the scene.