The Design of an Automated Unit Test Code Generation System

This paper presents an overview of the design and implementation of a framework for automated unit test code generation in a .NET managed code environment, using XSLT, XML and the C# programming language. The primary knowledge and coding skills required for developing and using the framework are XSLT, XML, and C#. The framework is most useful in a software development scenario where dedicated software test engineers are employed for testing activities, and these test engineers have XSLT and XML knowledge but not necessarily strong C# coding ability. An advantage of the framework compared to some alternative approaches is that because the framework uses .NET reflection, access to the source code of the system under test is not required. After initial development, most of the testing update effort consists of editing relatively simple XSLT files.