Contract verification of ETL transformations

Abstract

Model driven engineering is a new paradigm in software engineering in which software is automatically generated from the model via applying transformations. Model transformations, which are defined using transformation languages, play the major role in model driven approaches. During the last decade, different transformation languages have been introduced to the model driven community. Epsilon Transformation Language (ETL) is one of the most widely used ones across the community. Since the correctness of a transformation has direct impact on generating the final product, verification of a model transformation is an important issue. In this paper, we aim to propose an approach to verify the correctness of ETL transformations. Our proposal is to use DSLTrans, which is a graph transformation language, as well as the SyVOLT tool, which provides symbolic execution of DSLTrans transformations. To achieve our goal, first we transform the ETL transformation to DSLTrans, then, using the SyVOLT tool, we verify the transformation. To evaluate our approach, a case study is performed and the results suggest its capability to detect errors that previously were not easily identifiable.