Automated Test-Design from Requirements - The Specmate Tool

Abstract

Designing a small set of tests that nonetheless cover the requirements sufficiently is tantamount to keep costs for testing at bay while still maintaining the necessary quality. Engineering an opti- mal test-suite requires both, insight into the domain and the system under test, but also carefully examining the combinatorics inherent in the requirements. Especially the second part is a cognitive chal- lenge and systematic methods are cumbersome when performed by hand. In this paper, we present Specmate, a tool that supports and partly automates the design of tests from requirements. It pro- vides light-weight modeling techniques to capture requirements, test generation facilities to create test specifications and further supporting functions to derive test procedures or test-scripts from specifications. Specmate has been developed and evaluated in the context of one of the core business systems of Allianz Deutsch- land, a large insurance company. The source code is freely avail- able at GitHub and an online-demo of Specmate is available at http://specmate.in.tum.de.