Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Software tests are intellectual assets, too, and are as valuable as source code to a software project. Over the long term, maintainable software tests significantly lower a project's cost. It is very difficult, however, to write maintainable software tests, especially executable ones. Existing approaches - including natural language, tables or forms, test scripts, programming languages, and test description languages - all are problematic, as discussed in this paper. Another solution is a test description language that provides a mechanism to specify software tests while separating different concerns of automated software testing.

In this paper, we analyze the current situation of software test description. We propose a description language just for software testers: TestTalk. We present examples to illustrate the benefits of TestTalk and discuss implementation issues of this language. The primary goal of TestTalk is to enable tests to he written once, and then used by anyone (i.e., they are understandable), anytime (i.e.,they are maintainable as the software evolves), anywhere (i.e.,they can he ported to a new platform), and with anything (i.e., they can be used with any testing tool in any testing environment).