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Constrained permutation-based test scenario generation from concurrent activity diagrams

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Abstract

Concurrency in application systems can be designed and visualized using concurrent activity diagrams. Such diagrams are useful to design concurrency test scenarios for testing. However, the number of test scenarios inside a fork-join construct could be exponential in size. The commonly used permutation technique generates all possible test scenarios, but it is exponential in size. Existing UML graph theoretic-based approaches generate a few test scenarios for concurrency testing. But they do not consider the full functionality of concurrent activity diagrams. In this work, we present two constrained permutation-based test scenario generation approaches, namely the level permutation and DFS level permutation for concurrent activity diagrams. These approaches restrict the exponential size to a reasonable size of test scenarios. It is achieved by generating a subset of permutations at different levels. The generated test scenarios are sufficient to uncover most concurrency errors like synchronization, data-race, and deadlocks. The proposed technique improves interleaving activity path coverage up to 35% compared to the existing approaches.

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Notes

  1. Data Source: https://github.com/MaheshShirole/LevelPermutation

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Acknowledgements

The major part of this work was done, while the authors were at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. The authors thank the reviewers for their valuable comments. The authors are also thankful to the Editor-in-Chief, the Editor, and the Editorial Office Assistant(s) for managing this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute, Mumbai, 400 019, India

    Mahesh Shirole

  2. School of Computer and Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110 067, India

    Rajeev Kumar

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  1. Mahesh Shirole
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  2. Rajeev Kumar
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Correspondence to Mahesh Shirole.

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Shirole, M., Kumar, R. Constrained permutation-based test scenario generation from concurrent activity diagrams. Innovations Syst Softw Eng 17, 343–353 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11334-021-00389-4

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