Abstract
Model transformations are cornerstone elements of Model Driven Engineering (MDE), and their quality directly affects the successful application of MDE in practice. However, due to the characteristics of model transformation programs, the debugging of model transformations faces the oracle problem. In this paper, we propose an approach of debugging model transformations by using the technique of metamorphic testing (MT). Our approach leverages MT to alleviate the oracle problem, and integrates MT with spectrum-based fault localization technique to locating faulty rules of model transformations. We conduct experiments to evaluate our approach by using open-source model transformation programs, and compare the effectiveness of our approach with that of a fault localization technique using constraint-based oracles. Both of the experimental analysis and the comparison study show that our approach is of promising effectiveness, suggesting that MT can be a good support for debugging model transformations.
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grant numbers 61210004, 61170015, 61802349 and Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant numbers LY17F020033, LY20F020021 and by the Fundamental Research Funds of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University under Grant numbers 17032184-Y, 2019Q041, 2019Q039.
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Du, K., Jiang, M., Ding, Z., Huang, H., Shu, T. (2020). Metamorphic Testing in Fault Localization of Model Transformations. In: Miao, H., Tian, C., Liu, S., Duan, Z. (eds) Structured Object-Oriented Formal Language and Method. SOFL+MSVL 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12028. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41418-4_20
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