The cow_suite approach to planning and deriving test suites in UML projects

Cow_Suite provides an integrated and practical approach to the strategic generation and planning of UML-based test suites, since the early stages of system analysis and modeling. It consists of two original components working in combination: the Cowtest strategy,which organizes the testing process and helps the manager to select among the many potential test cases, and the UIT method, which performs the automated generation of test cases from the UML diagrams. The approach can be used in incremental way, starting from the preliminary (even incomplete) UML diagrams, and is applied to integration subsystems, as interactively selected by the tester. The emphasis is on usability, in that we use exactly the same UML diagrams developed for analysis and design, without requiring any additional formalism or ad-hoc effort specifically for testing purposes. Cow_Suite has been implemented in a prototype tool, and is currently being validated in an industrial development environment.