Automatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavior

Sunil Kamalakar, Stephen H. Edwards, Tung M. Dao

2013

Abstract

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is an emerging agile development approach where all stakeholders (including developers and customers) work together to write user stories in structured natural language to capture a software application’s functionality in terms of required `behaviors.' Developers can then manually write `glue' code so that these scenarios can be translated into executable software tests. This glue code represents individual steps within unit and acceptance test cases, and tools exist that automate the mapping from scenario descriptions to manually written code steps (typically using regular expressions). This paper takes the position that, instead of requiring programmers to write manual glue code, it is practical to convert natural language scenario descriptions into executable software tests %{\it fully automatically}%. To show feasibility, this paper presents preliminary results from a tool called Kirby that uses natural language processing techniques to automatically generate executable software tests from structured English scenario descriptions. Kirby relieves the developer from the laborious work of writing code for the individual steps described in scenarios, so that both developers and customers can both focus on the scenarios as pure behavior descriptions (understandable to all, not just programmers). Preliminary results from assessing the per-formance and accuracy of this technique are presented.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Kamalakar S., H. Edwards S. and M. Dao T. (2013). Automatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavior . In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-8565-62-4, pages 238-245. DOI: 10.5220/0004566002380245

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase13,
author={Sunil Kamalakar and Stephen H. Edwards and Tung M. Dao},
title={Automatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavior},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2013},
pages={238-245},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004566002380245},
isbn={978-989-8565-62-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Automatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavior
SN - 978-989-8565-62-4
AU - Kamalakar S.
AU - H. Edwards S.
AU - M. Dao T.
PY - 2013
SP - 238
EP - 245
DO - 10.5220/0004566002380245