From Requirements Specification to Tests Execution: An Integrated Approach from Acceptance Tests Perspective

Abstract

Software requirements engineers and testers often define technical documents in natural language. However, this can cause problems, such as ambiguity, incompleteness, and inconsistency in the documentation, which, in turn, can lead to implementation errors. Also, to define acceptance tests, testers need to read and interpret these documents, and if they are not clear enough, test cases will also have the same problems, and the final system will be different from the intended one. Previous research has shown that writing requirements and tests in a structured way, with controlled natural languages like ITLingo, can help mitigate these problems. Once all of the requirements are at the end of their design, they can be validated by the RSL language, which allows identifying and correct inconsistencies. It has also been demonstrated that it is possible to define test cases directly in these documents, and once these tests are written, the test scripts are automatically generated. This study seeks to go further, discussing new experiments carried out to validate the language RSL with its complementary tools, (called "ITLingo Studio") can be applied in different systems and technologies, and using the preliminary results as indicators and motivators of new optimizations to the tool, seeking to improve its current capabilities. In addition, new features are presented in the program. A different line of thought is reviewed related to applying test automation capabilities to security tests. This approach is later validated in a fictitious virtual store, namely the Juice Shop application, which in addition to serving as a test system, provides security flaws that allow the verification of this new approach. In the end, it was possible to validate that the optimizations related to the full automation of some task and the implementation of new tools to support the execution of the tasks proposed by ITLingo performed represent a significant decrease in the time that users need to perform all of the steps in the ITLingo Studio, thus increasing the maturity of the tool.