Automatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavior

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dc.contributor.authorSunil Kamalakar, FNUen
dc.contributor.committeechairMittelman, David Alexanderen
dc.contributor.committeechairEdwards, Stephen H.en
dc.contributor.committeememberTilevich, Elien
dc.contributor.departmentComputer Scienceen
dc.date.accessioned2013-10-19T08:00:09Zen
dc.date.available2013-10-19T08:00:09Zen
dc.date.issued2013-10-18en
dc.description.abstractBehavior-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 re- quired "behaviors". Developers then manually write "glue" code so that these scenarios can be executed as 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). Instead of requiring programmers to write manual glue code, this thesis investigates a practical approach to con- vert natural language scenario descriptions into executable software tests fully automatically. To show feasibility, we developed a tool called Kirby that uses natural language processing techniques, code information extraction and probabilistic matching to automatically gener- ate 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). Results from assessing the performance and accuracy of this technique are presented.en
dc.description.degreeMaster of Scienceen
dc.format.mediumETDen
dc.identifier.othervt_gsexam:1714en
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10919/23907en
dc.publisherVirginia Techen
dc.rightsIn Copyrighten
dc.rights.urihttp://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/en
dc.subjectBehavior-Driven Developmenten
dc.subjectTest-Driven Developmenten
dc.subjectNatural Language Processingen
dc.subjectProbabilistic Analysisen
dc.subjectAutomated Code Generationen
dc.titleAutomatically Generating Tests from Natural Language Descriptions of Software Behavioren
dc.typeThesisen
thesis.degree.disciplineComputer Science and Applicationsen
thesis.degree.grantorVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State Universityen
thesis.degree.levelmastersen
thesis.degree.nameMaster of Scienceen

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