Forward-Propagation Approach for Generating Feasible and Minimum Test Case Suites From Cause-Effect Graph Specifications

Abstract

Cause-effect graphs are a popular black-box testing technique. The most commonly used approach for generating test cases from cause-effect graph specifications uses backward-propagation of forced effect activations through the graph in order to get the values of causes for the desired test case. Many drawbacks have been identified when using this approach for different testing requirements. Several algorithms for automatically generating test case suites from cause-effect graph specifications have been proposed. However, many of these algorithms do not solve the main drawbacks of the initial back-propagation approach and offer only minor improvements for specific purposes. This work proposes two new algorithms for deriving test cases from cause-effect graph representations. Forward-propagation of cause values is used for generating the full feasible test case suite, whereas multiple effect activations are taken into account for reducing the feasible test case suite size. Evaluation of the test case suites generated by using the proposed algorithms was performed by using the newly introduced test effect coverage and fault detection rate effectiveness metrics. The evaluation shows that the proposed algorithms work in real time even for a very large number of cause nodes. The results also indicate that the proposed algorithm for generating all feasible test cases generates a larger test case suite, whereas the proposed algorithm for test case suite minimization generates a smaller test case subset than the originally proposed approaches while ensuring the maximum effect coverage, fault detection rate effectiveness and a better test effect coverage ratio.

Keywords

• Black-box testing
• cause-effect graph
• forward-propagation algorithm
• software quality
• test suite generation