Named Entity Recognition for Automated Test Case Generation

Testing is the process of evaluating a software or hardware against its requirement specification. It helps to verify and grade a given system. Recent emphasis on Test Driven Development (TDD) has increased the need for testing from the early stages of software development. System test cases can be obtained from a number of user specifications such as functional requirements; UML diagrams and use case specification. This paper focuses on automating the test process from the early stages of requirement elicitation in the development of software. It describes a semi-supervised technique to generate test cases by identifying named entities in the given set of use cases. The named entities along with flow listing of the use cases serves as the source for scenario matrix from which a number of test cases can be obtained for a given scenario. The Named Entity Recognizer (NER) is trained by a set of features extracted from the use cases. The automated generation of entity list was found to increase the efficiency of the overall system.