Test Generation from Business Rules

Enterprise applications are dicult to test because their intended
functionality is either not described precisely enough or described
in cumbersome business rules. It takes a lot of eort on the part
of a test architect to understand all the business rules and design
tests that “cover” them, i.e., exercise all their constituent scenarios.
Part of the problem is that it takes a complicated set up sequence
to drive an application to a state in which a business rule can even
fire. In this paper, we present a business rule modeling language
that can be used to capture functional specification of an enterprise
system. The language makes it possible to build tool support for
rule authoring, so that obvious deficiencies in rules can be detected
mechanically. Most importantly, we show how to mechanically
generate test sequences—i.e., test steps and test data—needed to
exercise these business rules. To this end, we translate the rules
into logical formulae and use constraint solving to generate test
sequences. One of our contributions is to overcome scalability issues
in this process, and we do this by using a novel algorithm for
organizing search through the space of candidate sequences to discover
covering sequences. Our results on three case studies show
the promise of our approach.