Environment-Driven Abstraction Identification for Requirements-Based Testing

Abstractions are significant domain terms that have assisted in requirements elicitation and modeling. To extend the assistance towards requirements validation, we present in this paper an automated approach to identifying the abstractions for supporting requirements-based testing. We select relevant Wikipedia pages to serve as a domain corpus that is independent from any specific software system. We further define five novel patterns based on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and frame our candidate abstractions in the form of pairs for better testability. We evaluate our approach with six software systems in two application domains: Electronic health records and Web conferencing. The results show that our abstractions are more accurate than those generated by two of the state-of-the-art techniques. Initial findings also indicate our abstractions’ capabilities of revealing bugs and matching the environmental assumptions created manually.