Evaluating a Design Pattern for Black-Box Testing in Executable UML

Abstract

As software systems become more and more complex, finding ways to make software development more efficient is becoming more important. Model-Driven Development (MDD) presents us with possibilities to keep up with this ever increasing complexity. Testing has long been a critical part of software development, and new challenges in testing are introduced when adopting MDD. In an effort to face these challenges and provide a methodical approach to testing in MDD, this thesis evaluates a proposed design pattern. The pattern describes how to build an executable test model which describes and verifies expected behavior of the system under consideration, using a general-purpose modeling language. This allows testing to be done at both model- and code level through model transformation. The evaluation was done by creating a set of implementations using the proposed design pattern. Each implementation was intended to highlight specific aspects of the pattern. Knowledge gained by studying related work, together with observations made during the development of each implementation, was used to draw conclusions about the suggested design pattern.