Definition of a Behavior-Driven Model for Requirements Specification and Testing of Interactive Systems Thiago Rocha Silva To cite this version: Thiago Rocha Silva. Definition of a Behavior-Driven Model for Requirements Specification and Testing of Interactive Systems. 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE 2016), Sep 2016, Beijin, China. pp. 444-449. hal-01712535 HAL Id: hal-01712535 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01712535 Submitted on 19 Feb 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Open Archive TOULOUSE Archive Ouverte ( OATAO ) OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID : 18851 The contribution was presented at RE 2016 : http://www.re16.org/ To link to this article : URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/RE.2016.12 To cite this version : Rocha Silva, Thiago Definition of a Behavior-Driven Model for Requirements Specification and Testing of Interactive Systems. (2016) In: 24th IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE 2016), 12 September 2016 - 16 September 2016 (Beijin, China). Any correspondence co ncerning this service should be sent to the repository administrator: staff -oatao@listes -diff.inp -toulouse.fr Definition of a behavior-driven model for requirements specification and testing of interactive systems Thiago Rocha Silva ICS-IRIT Université Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III Toulouse, France [email protected] Abstract — In a user-centered development process, artifacts ject. According to Uusitalo et al. [6], traceability between re- are aimed to evolve in iterative cycles until they meet users’ re- quirements and tests was rarely maintained in practice. This quirements and then become the final product. Every cycle gives was caused primarily by failure to update traces when require- the opportunity to revise the design and to introduce new re- ments change, due to stringent enforcement of schedules and quirements which might affect the specification of artifacts that budgets, as well as difficulties to conduct testing processes have been set in former development phases. Testing the con- sistency of multiple artifacts used to develop interactive systems through a manual approach. In most cases, interviewees in every time that a new requirement is introduced it is a cumber- industry longed for better tool support for traceability. Some some and time consuming activity, especially if it should be done also noted that poor quality of requirements was a hindrance to manually. For that we propose an approach based on Behavior- maintaining the traces, since there is no guarantee how well the Driven Development (BDD) to support the automated assessment requirements covered the actual functionality of the product. of artifacts along the development process of interactive systems. In this context, Behavior Driven Development (BDD) [4] In order to prevent that test should be written to every type of has aroused interest from both academic and industrial com- artifact, we investigate the use of ontologies for specifying the test munities in the last years. Supported by a wide development once and then run it in all artifacts sharing the ontological con- philosophy that includes Acceptance Test-Driven Development cepts. Index Terms — Automated Requirements Checking, Behavior- (ATDD) [7] and Specification by Example [8], BDD drives Driven Development, Ontological Modeling, Prototyping, Multi- development teams to a requirements specification based on Artifact Testing. User Stories [9] in a comprehensive natural language format. This format allows specify executable requirements, which I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION mean we can test our requirements specification directly, con- ducting to a “live” documentation and making easier for the When designing new software systems, clients and users clients to set their final acceptance tests. It guides the system are keen to introduce new requirements along successive itera- development and brings the opportunity to test Scenarios di- tions. This characteristic has an impact in the future develop- rectly in the User Interface (UI) with the aid of external frame- ment as well as in previously developed artifacts. Requirements works for different platforms. should be tested and verified against not only the software However, this technique is currently limited and allows us already produced, but also against the other permanent artifacts to test requirements only against a Final User Interface (Final produced throughout the process. It leads us to a cycle of per- UI), using software robots that those external frameworks pro- manent production of multiple artifacts, in multiple versions, vide. Besides that, specifications using only Scenarios are not evolving all along of multiple phases of development. self-sufficient to provide a concrete perception of the system to The artifacts traceability problem has been studied by sev- the users and, at the same time, allow an overall description of eral authors and a wide set of commercial tools have been de- the system in terms of tasks that may be accomplished. For veloped to address this problem in various approaches [3]. that, the use of Prototypes and Task Models is well accepted as Nonetheless, solutions to promote vertical traceability of arti- a good approach to address User-Centered Design (UCD), facts can simply track them among themselves, not allowing to providing a concrete perception of the system under develop- effectively testing them against requirements specifications. It ment and allowing an overall description of the tasks in execut- is a peaceful argument that testing plays a crucial role in the able Scenarios. quality of the software under development. Moreover, the Moreover, domain ontologies are an effective means to rep- sooner the teams pay attention to test their software compo- resent concepts and relationships when integrating all of these nents and especially their requirements specifications, more techniques and approaches in a formal model. According to effective will be the results towards a quality assurance of the Gruber [10], ontologies describe concepts, relationships and product. behaviors between elements in a given domain. In the context Lindstrom [5] declared that failure to trace tests to require- of interactive systems development, we are studying the use of ments is one of the five most effective ways to destroy a pro- ontologies to create a flexible and reusable model that could other hand, Scenarios extracted from Task Models in the UCD support the description of an extensive set of artifacts, as well processes do not provide the testing component which requires as their representations and behaviors for testing purposes. a heavy charge of effort to implement automated tests. Thus, the challenge is how to use a combination of both practices to II. RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES provide a practical method to extract useful and testable Sce- In this thesis work, we are trying to answer two main re- narios as well as bringing the testing component for require- search questions: (i) “Ontologies are useful to support the de- ments specifications. velopment of testable User Stories?” and (ii) “Are User Stories In short, these concerns bring us three main challenges: (i) self-enough to support the multi-artifact testing process?”. formalize requirements in order to provide testability in an Based on these questions, we have two main hypotheses: (i) automated approach for multiple artifacts in ever-changing the use of a common ontological model makes easier the reuse environments; (ii) provide vertical and bidirectional traceability of behaviors for the testing of interactive systems, and (ii) re- of the requirements, ensuring reliability and consistency be- quirements expressed as User Stories can effectively support tween artifacts; and (iii) assure a complete and testable onto- automated testing in a wide spectrum of artifacts, assuring logical description of the requirements artifacts to support au- traceability and consistency. tomated testing in an integrated way. To answer these questions and to verify our hypotheses, we study in this thesis a new ontological perspective for Behavior- IV. STATE OF THE ART Driven Development (BDD) to describe requirements in a Sce- A. User Stories and Scenarios nario-based approach [11], aiming multi-artifact testing since early in the design process. This approach aims to address the User Stories have a large meaning in the literature. The challenge of testing different artifacts throughout the develop- Human-Computer Interaction community understands this ment process of interactive systems, checking their correct concept as stories that users tell to describe their activities and correspondence with requirements, thus promoting as a conse- jobs during typical requirements meetings. This concept of quence vertical and bidirectional traceability