Specification-Driven Test Generation for Model Transformations

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor de la comunicación de congreso publicada en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in: El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription Specification-driven test generation for model transformationsEsther GuerraUniversidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) Esther.Guerra@uam.es Abstract. Testing model transformations poses several challenges, among them the automatic generation of appropriate input test models and the specification of oracle functions. Most approaches to the generation of input models ensure a certain level of source meta-model coverage, whereas the oracle functions are frequently defined using query or graph languages. Both tasks are usually performed independently regardless their common purpose, and sometimes there is a gap between the properties exhibited by the generated input models and those demanded to the transformations (as given by the oracles).Recently, we proposed a formal specification language for the declarative formulation of transformation properties (invariants, pre-and postconditions) from which we generated partial oracle functions that facilitate testing of the transformations. Here we extend the usage of our specification language for the automated generation of input test models by constraint solving. The testing process becomes more intentional because the generated models ensure a certain coverage of the interesting properties of the transformation. Moreover, we use the same specification to consistently derive both the input test models and the oracle functions.

Specification-driven model transformation testing

“…Moreover, the use of the same specification to consistently derive both the input models for testing and the oracle functions for different coverage criteria is also novel. This paper extends [22] by including a more thorough related work section, a formal presentation of our specification language, an integral exposition of the whole framework, and more importantly, we discuss the results of a set of experiments to measure the effectiveness of the different levels of coverage defined for specifications. Input test model generation in these experiments has been carried out using the ocl2smt model finder [45], which has been recently integrated in our transformation testing tool.…”

“…This has been done for performance reasons, as we noticed that the SMT formalization was advantageous compared to the CSP formalization for the considered model transformations. Instead, in [22], we used the UMLtoCSP [8] solver for model generation, as it is also integrated in our testing tool.…”

Testing M2T/T2M Transformations

“…In previous work [13] we proposed a declarative language for the specification of visual contracts for defining pre-and post-conditions as well as invariants for model transformations. For evaluating the contracts on test models, the specifications are translated to QVT Relations which are executed in check-only mode.…”

“…Several approaches have been developed for defining contracts for M2M transformations that act as specifications for model transformation implementations [5,12], as oracle functions to validate the output of transformations [12,13], and as drivers for generating test cases [13]. In particular, constraints for input models, output models and for the relationship between both may be specified.…”

ATLTest: A White-Box Test Generation Approach for ATL Transformations

“…Currently, the majority of approaches facing this challenge are based on black-box techniques [11,9,10,16,21,22,3,6,20,8,13]. As far as we know only two white-box approaches for transformation testing have been proposed [9,15].…”