Abstract

Effort reduction in software testing is important to reduce the total cost of the software development project. UML activity diagram is used by the tester for test path generation. It is hard to select the appropriate test path generation technique to diminish the effort of software testing. In the experiment, we compared the efficiency of 12 commonly-used test path generation techniques with both simple activity diagrams and the constructed complex activity diagrams. The experimental results summarized in four aspects. (1) The most appropriate test path generation technique for path testing generates the number of paths equivalent to the target number of all possible paths. (2) The suitable test path generation technique for the concurrency test scenario. (3) The techniques that can generate test paths covering basis path coverage in the case that testing all possible paths for the large or complex object-oriented method is laborious. (4) To compare the efficiency of test path generation algorithms, the percentage test path deviation to the target number of all possible paths is calculated for the constructed complex activity diagrams. We also recommended suitable test path generation methods for each manner of the UML activity diagram.