Automated test case generation from correct and complete system requirements models

This paper shall discuss a technique for automatically generating test cases from system requirements models. Automatically generating test cases directly from requirements models has several benefits: 1) Test-case generation is a time-consuming task and automating it saves resources. 2) The test cases can be generated before any code is written, which will allow developers to use the test cases as they develop the code. This reduces the number of iterations between development and testing, further saving resources. 3) One major cause of software related accidents occurs when requirements are miscommunicated to the developers or are not delivered to them at all. Test cases generated directly from system requirements can be used to detect such errors, whereas most white-box test-generation algorithms would have no means of doing so. Safeware has developed a technique for automatically generating test cases from SpecTRM-RL models. SpecTRM-RL is a requirements-specification language developed by Professor Nancy Leveson at MIT. This requirements language is based on a formal state machine model, yet is simple for non-experts to read and understand.