Automated Testing of Distributed and Heterogeneous Systems Based on UML Sequence Diagrams

Abstract

The growing dependence of our society on increasingly complex software systems makes software testing ever more important and challenging. In many domains, several independent systems, forming a distributed and heterogeneous system of systems, are involved in the provisioning of end-to-end services to users. However, existing test automation techniques provide little tool support for properly testing such systems. Hence, we propose an approach and toolset architecture for automating the testing of end-to-end services in distributed and heterogeneous systems, comprising a visual modeling environment, a test execution engine, and a distributed test monitoring and control infrastructure. The only manual activity required is the description of the participants and behavior of the services under test with UML sequence diagrams, which are translated to extended Petri nets for efficient test input generation and test output checking at runtime. A real world example from the Ambient Assisted Living domain illustrates the approach.