A Behaviour-Driven Approach for Testing Requirements via User and System Stories in Agent Systems

Testing is a critical part of the software development cycle. This is even more important for autonomous systems, which can be challenging to test. In mainstream software engineering, Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is an Agile software development practice that is well accepted and widely used. It involves defining test cases for the expected system behaviour prior to developing the associated functionality. In this work, we present a BDD approach to testing the behavioural requirements of an agent system specified via User and System Stories (USS). USS is also based on established Agile processes and is shown to be intuitive and readily mapped to agent concepts. More specifically we extend USS so that they can be used for testing, and develop a behaviour-driven testing framework based on USS. We show how test cases can be developed, and how to evaluate the test cases by using a state-of-the-art mutation testing system, PITest, which we have integrated into our test framework. A key feature of our work is that we leverage a range of state-of-the-art development tools, inheriting the rich set of features they provide.