A Graph Analysis Based Approach for Specification-Driven Testing of Model Transformations

Abstract

Model transformation plays a critical role of model-driven approaches and is a significant quality factor for final products. Among current approaches to testing transformations, specification-driven testing gains much attention of research community since the black-box testing has many advantages including understandability for modelers and independence of transformation languages. One of the main challenges for this approach is how to systematically and effectively generate test cases from a transformation specification, i.e, rather than from its implementation. This paper aims to introduce a language on the one hand to precisely specify transformation requirements and on the other hand to facilitate the verification and validation of MTs. Within our approach, such a transformation specification language is defined based on triple-graph-grammar (TGG) rules and graph patterns that allow us to express transformation requirements in a visual, precise, and declarative way. Besides, we introduce a systematic testing framework to ensure many important properties of MTs such as syntactical correctness, completeness, functional behavior, and information preservation.