TITLE:
Traceability in Acceptance Testing
AUTHORS:
Jean-Pierre Corriveau, Wei Shi
KEYWORDS:
Validation; Acceptance Testing; Model-Based Testing; Traceability; Scenario Models
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Software Engineering and Applications,
Vol.6 No.10A,
October
17,
2013
ABSTRACT: Regardless of which (model-centric or
code-centric) development process is adopted, industrial software production
ultimately and necessarily requires the delivery of an executable
implementation. It is generally accepted that the quality of such an
implementation is of utmost importance. Yet current verification techniques,
including software testing, remain problematic. In this paper, we focus on
acceptance testing, that is, on the validation of the actual behavior of the
implementation under test against the requirements of stakeholder(s). This task
must be as objective and automated as possible. Our first goal is to review
existing code-based and model-based tools for testing in light of what such an
objective and automated approach to acceptance testing entails. Our contention
is that the difficulties we identify originate mainly in a lack of traceability
between a testable model of the requirements of the stakeholder(s) and the test
cases used to validate these requirements. We then investigate whether such
traceability is addressed in other relevant specification-based approaches.