An Approach To Test Concurrent Software Based On UML

Developing software is a kind of knowledge-intensive process and due to the limitation of human being; it is easy to have some errors in software. Software test is an effective and practical way to find these errors. As the software developing method and the software engineering process is developing rapidly, especially the Object-oriented techniques and USDP are applied extensively, the capability of software developing is well promoted, object-oriented software are more and more applied in various condition in society, but the features of object-oriented techniques bring new challenge to software test, and most traditional test methods for structure software are not fit to test object-oriented software, there is a crying need to study object-oriented software test method, furthermore, object-oriented techniques also promoted the applications of concurrence in software, this makes test even harder.As a standard model language for object-oriented software, UML is widely acknowledged. UML supports various works during each period of software developing process, it is able to give a good description of software using UML, and this could also give convenience to software test. So the method to test software based on UML is a hot issue in software test researching field. Many test methods and theories based on UML are proposed, however, it is hard to find any test method for concurrent software, this paper is focus on the test method for concurrent software, and it is meaningful to domestic software test method and techniques.Firstly, the basic test knowledge and theories are concluded, the importance of test model is given out, a test framework based on test sequence is proposed, test automation is introduced, the effect of object-oriented method and techniques to test is discussed and the object-oriented test are concluded, the test techniques based on UML are especially focused on, all of these is a good basis for concurrent software test method based on activity diagram.To test concurrent software effectively, the implement, the schedule strategies and the principal of concurrent control in computer are studied. Considering to the features of concurrent software, three test cover strategies are given out. They are the basic test principles for concurrent software: synchronization cover, key cover and threads cover, giving a direction to concurrent software test. Then, a method based on activity diagram to build up model for concurrent software is given out, and the model built up using this method could well describe the features of concurrent software, providing a good basis for concurrent software test. After the thread combination explosion problem of concurrent software test is analyzed, a method to generate test sequence and a method to test are proposed. According to the analysis later, the test method is proved to conquer the difficulty of thread combination explosion and fulfills the test strategies given before and provides an executable way to test concurrent software dynamically. And a contrast shows that this method is better than the method based on state diagram when the stability, adaptability and convenience are concerned. Because the model is built with the general concurrent control flow, the test method proposed can be used to test general concurrent software.To reduce the cost of test, tool software is designed to generate test sequences from activity diagram automatically. At the end, an example was given to show the application steps and to validate the feasibility and the validity of the test method.