Building Combinatorial Test Input Model from Use Case Artefacts

Combinatorial Testing is a test design methodology that aims to detect the interaction failures existing in the software under test. The combinatorial input space model comprises of the parameters and the values it can take. Building this input space model is a domain knowledge and experience intensive task. The objective of the paper is to assist test designer in building this test model. A rule based semi-automatic approach is proposed to derive the input space model elements from Use case specifications and UML use case diagrams. A natural language processing based parser and an XMI based parser are implemented. The rules formulated are applied on synthetic case studies and the output model is evaluated using precision and recall metrics. The results are promising and this approach will be of good use to the test designer.