D.Dranidis, K.Tigka, P.Kefalas
Formal Modelling of Use Cases with X-machines
Abstract: Use cases are a popular method for capturing
the behavioral re-quirements of software systems. They are usually written
in informal text form
describing the interactions between users and the system. Use cases
are the cen-tral driving artifacts in Unified Process (UP), an agile software
methodology.
Testing plays a very important role in UP and other agile methodologies,
such as Extreme Programming. X-machines is a formal method for the specification
of
systems. Furthermore, a method for testing systems specified by X-machines
ex-ists that generates a complete test case set. This paper proposes the
integration
of X-machines in the UML use case model, in order to facilitate the
generation of a complete test case set for system testing. We present a
transformation that
semi-automatically transforms use case text into its corresponding
X-machine model and we demonstrate the transformation by using the example
of an ATM.
We also suggest some improvements in the design of X-machine models,
such as the use of compound inputs (consisting of interaction functions
and data) and a
structured representation of the memory, giving an object-oriented
flavor, and we discuss the benefits of these improvements.
Available: Copy on request from the authors.
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