From Requirements to Automated Acceptance Tests with the RSL Language

Software testing can promote software quality. However, this activity is often performed at the end of projects where failures are most difficult to correct. Combining requirements specification activities with test design at an early stage of the software development process can be beneficial. One way to do this is to use a more structured requirements specification language. This allow to reduce typical problems such as ambiguity, inconsistency, and incorrectness in requirements and may allow the automatic generation of (parts of) acceptance test cases reducing the test design effort. In this paper we discuss an approach that promotes the practice of requirements specification combined with testing specification. This is a model-based approach that promotes the alignment between requirements and tests, namely, test cases and also low-level automated test scripts. To show the applicability of this approach, we integrate two complementary languages: (i) the ITLingo RSL (Requirements Specification Language) that is specially designed to support both requirements and tests rigorously and consistently specified; and (ii) the Robot language, which is a low-level keyword-based language for specifying test scripts. This approach includes model-to-model transformation processes, namely a transformation process from requirements (defined in RSL) into test cases (defined in RSL), and a second transformation process from test cases (in RSL) into test scripts (defined according the Robot framework). This approach was applied in a fictitious online store that illustrates the various phases of the proposal.