Traceability in Acceptance Testing

Jean-Pierre Corriveau, Wei Shi

Business and Information Technology, University of Ontario Institute of Technology Oshawa, Canada.
School of Computer Science, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

DOI: 10.4236/jsea.2013.610A005                

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.

Keywords

Validation; Acceptance Testing; Model-Based Testing; Traceability; Scenario Models

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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