Extending the non-functional modeling of UML-TP

The importance of the validation of non-functional properties such as performance and dependability has been broadly recognized by the research community. However, the results of a systematic survey we carried out evidenced the lack of a standard notation for designing non-functional test cases. Model-based testing (MBT) is an emerging testing paradigm for the automatic derivation of concrete test cases starting from the abstract models of a system under test and/or its environment. For some time, the greatest attention of MBT research has focused on functional aspects. The only exception is represented by the UML Testing Profile (UML-TP) that is a lightweight extension of UML to support the design of testing artifacts, but it only provides limited support for non-functional testing. In this paper we propose an extended version of UML-TP aimed at improving the design of non-functional tests. The proposed extension deals with some important concepts of non-functional testing such as the workload and the global verdicts. As a proof of concept we show how the extended UML-TP can be used for modeling non-functional test cases of an application example. Also, the planning and results of the survey are presented.