Requirements-Based Test Generation: A Comprehensive Survey

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Zhenzhen Yang, Rubing Huang, Chenhui Cui, Nan Niu, Dave Towey

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 15 Jan 2026CoRR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: As an important way of assuring software quality, software testing generates and executes test cases to identify software failures. Many strategies have been proposed to guide test-case generation, such as source-code-based approaches and methods based on bug reports. Requirements-based test generation (RBTG) constructs test cases based on specified requirements, aligning with user needs and expectations, without requiring access to the source code. Since its introduction in 1994, there have been many contributions to the development of RBTG, including various approaches, implementations, tools, assessment and evaluation methods, and applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on RBTG, categorizing requirement types, classifying approaches, investigating types of test cases, summarizing available tools, and analyzing experimental evaluations. This paper also summarizes the domains and industrial applications of RBTG, and discusses some open research challenges and potential future work.