Research On The Combination Of UML Technology And Test-Driven Development Technology

Both the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the Test-Driven Development (TDD) are the excellent achievements, which were put forward in the development process of software engineering. All the time, people rarely use both of them into the same software development process. However, practices indicate that, combining OOA/D with XP will be the extremely effective development pattern, and UML is the main technology of OOA/D. So, the researching on the combination of UML and TDD has important significance.First, this paper discusses unit test case generation based on UML state diagram and test coverage criteria. On this basis, studies the unit test case generation based on UML class diagram and its OCL invariant constraint and pre-/post- condition and the criteria of test coverage. Following that, this paper discusses and analyses the relation between UML and TDD, and gets a conclusion that TDD can not be separated from UML in many circumstances of actual development.On the basis of above research, this paper proposes an approach to combine UML with TDD to develop software. This approach lets UML class diagram with its OCL constraint and the automated unit-testing framework introduced into TDD as a bridge between UML and TDD.Therefore, this paper has a further study on the method of unit test cases automatically generating from UML class diagram and its OCL constraint. We can use this method to generate NUnit assertion format test code based on OCL invariant constraint supplemented with class and OCL pre-/post- condition supplemented with class method respectively by parsing UML class diagram and its OCL constraint. The generated test code can be run under NUnit framework automatically.Finally, this paper designs and develops a test case generation system based on above research. And the feasibility of the topic of this paper is verified by this system.