Generating Test Data for Blackbox Testing from UML-Based Web Engineering Content and Presentation Models

Software testing is a process that produces and consumes huge amounts of data. Thus, the test data is usually either gathered manually by the testers or randomly generated by tools. The manual method consumes lot of time and highly depends on the testers’ experience while the random approach faces the problem of redundant test data caused by identical use cases. By leveraging the concept of Model-based testing, this paper provides a novel method of testing to save the cost of manual testing and to increase the reliability of the testing processes. In Model-based testing, test cases and test data can be derived from different models. In this paper, we present a technique to generate test data from UML-based Web Engineering (UWE) presentation model for web application testing by using formal specification and Z3 SMT solver. We also build a model-based testing Eclipse Plug-in tool called TESTGER-UWE that generates test data based on the model of UWE for the web application. We evaluate the proposed methods by applying them to generate test data for an Address Book project of UWE. Experimental results show that our proposed methods can reduce the time significantly when generating test data for automation test tools such as Selenium, Katalon, Unit test, etc.