  Today statecharts are a de facto standard in industry for modeling system
behavior. Test data generation is one of the key issues in software testing.
This paper proposes an reduction approach to test data generation for the
state-based software testing. In this paper, first state transition graph is
derived from state chart diagram. Then, all the required information are
extracted from the state chart diagram. Then, test cases are generated. Lastly,
a set of test cases are minimized by calculating the node coverage for each
test case. It is also determined that which test cases are covered by other
test cases. The advantage of our test generation technique is that it optimizes
test coverage by minimizing time and cost. The present test data generation
scheme generates test cases which satisfy transition path coverage criteria,
path coverage criteria and action coverage criteria. A case study on Railway
Ticket Vending Machine (RTVM) has been presented to illustrate our approach.
