Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Model-based testing using UML activity diagrams: A systematic mapping study

2019; Elsevier BV; Volume: 33; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.cosrev.2019.07.001

1876-7745

Tanwir Ahmad, Junaid Iqbal, Adnan Ashraf, Dragoş Truşcan, Iván Porres,

Software Engineering Research

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has become the de facto standard for software modeling. UML models are often used to visualize, understand, and communicate the structure and behavior of a system. UML activity diagrams (ADs) are often used to elaborate and visualize individual use cases. Due to their higher level of abstraction and process-oriented perspective, UML ADs are also highly suitable for model-based test generation. In the last two decades, different researchers have used UML ADs for test generation. Despite the growing use of UML ADs for model-based testing, there are currently no comprehensive and unbiased studies on the topic. To present a comprehensive and unbiased overview of the state-of-the-art on model-based testing using UML ADs. We review and structure the current body of knowledge on model-based testing using UML ADs by performing a systematic mapping study using well-known guidelines. We pose nine research questions, outline our selection criteria, and develop a classification scheme. The results comprise 41 primary studies analyzed against nine research questions. We also highlight the current trends and research gaps in model-based testing using UML ADs and discuss some shortcomings for researchers and practitioners working in this area. The results show that the existing approaches on model-based testing using UML ADs tend to rely on intermediate formats and formalisms for model verification and test generation, employ a multitude of graph-based coverage criteria, and use graph search algorithms. We present a comprehensive overview of the existing approaches on model-based testing using UML ADs. We conclude that (1) UML ADs are not being used for non-functional testing, (2) only a few approaches have been validated against realistic, industrial case studies, (3) most approaches target very restricted application domains, and (4) there is currently a clear lack of holistic approaches for model-based testing using UML ADs.