Application Of Model-based Testing Technology In Development ERP System

With the increase of software scale and complexity, the difficulty of software testing is also rising increasingly. In this case, model-based testing has recently gained attentions from research community and industry. In the field of software engineering, the model has been widely accepted as a part of object-oriented methods and design, models can help developers analyze, describe, design and build the entire system. Models can also be used in testing. Model-based testing is testing based on a model that describes how the program is supposed to behave. The model is used to automatically generate the test cases, and can also be used as the oracle that checks whether the system under test passes the tests. Model-based testing is not only able to effectively reduce the cost and the time of testing, but also highly achieve code coverage and improve the quality of testing.This paper introduces the application of model-based testing techniques in development of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems. As ERP system has its own complexity due to the fact that it covers the all business in of enterprises, the testers are required not only to have the testing knowledge, but also to be familiar with the business process of enterprise management, which results in the great difficulties in testing. However, an easy solution to testing ERP system is found by using model-based testing. To ensure the business processes of ERP is correct, testers can build the model via model-based testing tools which then is used to generate the test cases. Once the business processes have been altered or expanded, testers can also update the test case suite via model-based testing tools, thus, testers avoid the difficulties and potential errors by maintaining a large number of existing test cases. With the main goal of ensuring the accuracy of ERP business processes and improving the code reusability and code coverage, model-based testing techniques will be applied to testing in MAX which is a software product of a company as a platform. The study includes: first, the business processes which is commonly used will be analyzed, the possible operations and system response will be taken into account from a user's point of view; next, a model which expresses the correct business processes will be tried to build, the operations will be encapsulated in the code level which can be reused based on automation testing framework; finally, a model-based testing tool will be developed, which has the ability to build and parse a variety of different types of models, as well as to generate automatically the test cases and the oracles by traversing methods according to theoretical knowledge, also the tool is able to interact MAX to run these test cases and save the results.Since model-based testing has been put into use, the testing of MAX system has been greatly improved. The results show that model-based testing is capable of finding defects and improving the reliability of ERP system. More importantly, it also succeeds in reducing the complexity of testing and shortening the testing lifecycle.