Requirements-Based Test Generation: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews requirements-based test generation (RBTG), covering its approaches, tools, evaluations, applications, and future challenges, highlighting its significance in software quality assurance without source code access.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive classification and analysis of RBTG approaches, tools, and applications, and discusses open research challenges and future directions.

Findings

Categorizes requirement types and approaches in RBTG

Summarizes available tools and their evaluations

Identifies open challenges and future research directions

Abstract

As an important way of assuring software quality, software testing generates and executes test cases to identify software failures. Many strategies have been proposed to guide test-case generation, such as source-code-based approaches and methods based on bug reports. Requirements-based test generation (RBTG) constructs test cases based on specified requirements, aligning with user needs and expectations, without requiring access to the source code. Since its introduction in 1994, there have been many contributions to the development of RBTG, including various approaches, implementations, tools, assessment and evaluation methods, and applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on RBTG, categorizing requirement types, classifying approaches, investigating types of test cases, summarizing available tools, and analyzing experimental evaluations. This paper also summarizes the domains and industrial applications of RBTG, and discusses some open research challenges and potential future work.