Property-oriented test generation from UML Statecharts

UML Statecharts is an important modeling formalism with hierarchy, concurrency, broadcast-communication mechanisms and data variables. These facilities help the developers to describe the complex behaviors of an object along its lifecycle naturally. However, the ease of modeling is at the expense of testing: the system developed from Statecharts usually has numerous behaviors and is therefore extremely difficult to receive comprehensive and in-depth testing. This work presents an approach to deriving targeted test sequences from UML Statecharts according to tester-specified temporal logic properties. Using this approach, testing efforts can be focused on specific properties of the system and usually only a small portion of the total behaviors will be tested. This method suits well the occasions when the testers are interested in just some specific properties of the system or when they have to focus on its critical properties in case that limited budget is available.