An ontology based approach for test scenario management

Abstract

Management of test scenarios involves ordering and selecting a set of test scenarios for testing with the objective of fulfilling criteria like maximizing coverage or discovering defects as early as possible. To do this, knowledge about the main activities in the domain and the interactions between them need to be maintained. This knowledge helps in categorizing scenarios as per the approaches used for testing. Current approaches to test management involve generating scenarios related to use cases. However, the use case based approach does not capture knowledge about the dependencies that exist among activities in the domain and therefore cannot provide complete information for scenario management. Ontologies provide a mechanism to represent this knowledge. They also provide a means to share and reason on knowledge that is captured. The objective of this work is to use ontologies to aid test management. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.