Model Transformation Testing and Debugging: A Survey

Model transformations are the key technique in Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to manipulate and construct models. As a consequence, the correctness of software systems built with MDE approaches relies mainly on the correctness of model transformations, and thus, detecting and locating bugs in model transformations have been popular research topics in recent years. This surge of work has led to a vast literature on model transformation testing and debugging, which makes it challenging to gain a comprehensive view of the current state of the art. This is an obstacle for newcomers to this topic and MDE practitioners to apply these approaches. This paper presents a survey on testing and debugging model transformations based on the analysis of \nPapers~papers on the topics. We explore the trends, advances, and evolution over the years, bringing together previously disparate streams of work and providing a comprehensive view of these thriving areas. In addition, we present a conceptual framework to understand and categorise the different proposals. Finally, we identify several open research challenges and propose specific action points for the model transformation community.This work is partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER) and Junta de Andalucia under projects APOLO (US-1264651) and EKIPMENT-PLUS (P18-FR-2895), by the Spanish Government (FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – Agencia Estatal de Investigación) under projects HORATIO (RTI2018-101204-B-C21), COSCA (PGC2018-094905-B-I00) and LOCOSS (PID2020-114615RB-I00), by the Austrian Science Fund (P 28519-N31, P 30525-N31), and by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development (CDG

A Query-based Approach for Verifying UML Class Diagrams with OCL Invariants.

Verifying whether a UML class diagram is consistent involves finding valid instances that provably meet its constraints defined in Object Constraint Language (OCL). Recent studies have shown that many existing tools and techniques not only can find valid instances but also pinpoint the conflicts among the OCL constraints. However, they do not scale well and are often unable to locate the conflicts when the number of OCL constraints significantly increases. In this paper, we present a novel approach that is capable of verifying UML class diagrams with a large number of OCL constraints. Our approach has two distinct features: (1) it provides a query language that allows users to choose parts of a UML class diagram to be verified. (2) a new algorithm that can handle an extreme size of OCL invariants via concurrent verification. We have implemented a new automated tool called: QMaxUSE. The evaluation results suggest that QMaxUSE has the potential to be adapted by industry and offers up to 30x efficiency improvement in verifying UML class diagrams with a large number of OCL constraints

CoqTL: A Coq DSL for Rule-Based Model Transformation

International audienc

Certifying a Rule-Based Model Transformation Engine for Proof Preservation

International audienceExecutable engines for relational model-transformation languages evolve continuously because of language extension, performance improvement and bug fixes. While new versions generally change the engine semantics, end-users expect to get backward-compatibility guarantees, so that existing transformations do not need to be adapted at every engine update.The CoqTL model-transformation language allows users to define model transformations, theorems on their behavior and machine-checked proofs of these theorems in Coq. Backward-compatibility for CoqTL involves also the preservation of these proofs. However, proof preservation is challenging, as proofs are easily broken even by small refactorings of the code they verify.In this paper we present the solution we designed for the evolution of CoqTL, and by extension, of rule-based transformation engines. We provide a deep specification of the transformation engine, including a set of theorems that must hold against the engine implementation. Then, at each milestone in the engine development, we certify the new version of the engine against this specification, by providing proofs of the impacted theorems. The certification formally guarantees end-users that all the proofs they write using the provided theorems will be preserved through engine updates. We illustrate the structure of the deep specification theorems, we produce a machine-checked certification of three versions of CoqTL against it, and we show examples of user theorems that leverage this specification and are thus preserved through the updates

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

computer software maintenance; computer software selection and evaluation; formal logic; formal methods; formal specification; programming languages; semantics; software engineering; specifications; verificatio

Automatically correcting syntactic and semantic errors in ATL transformations using multi-objective optimization

L’ingénierie dirigée par les modèles (EDM) est un paradigme de développement logiciel qui promeut l’utilisation de modèles en tant qu’artefacts de première plan et de processus automatisés pour en dériver d’autres artefacts tels que le code, la documentation et les cas de test. La transformation de modèle est un élément important de l’EDM puisqu’elle permet de manipuler les représentations abstraites que sont les modèles. Les transformations de modèles, comme d’autres programmes, sont sujettes à la fois à des erreurs syntaxiques et sémantiques. La correction de ces erreurs est difficile et chronophage, car les transformations dépendent du langage de transformation comme ATL et des langages de modélisation dans lesquels sont exprimés les modèles en entrée et en sortie. Les travaux existants sur la réparation des transformations ciblent les erreurs syntaxiques ou sémantiques, une erreur à la fois, et définissent manuellement des patrons de correctifs. L’objectif principal de notre recherche est de proposer un cadre générique pour corriger automatiquement de multiples erreurs syntaxiques et sémantiques. Afin d’atteindre cet objectif, nous reformulons la réparation des transformations de modèles comme un problème d’optimisation multiobjectif et le résolvons au moyen d’algorithmes évolutionnaires. Pour adapter le cadre aux deux catégories d’erreurs, nous utilisons différents types d’objectifs et des stratégies sophistiquées pour guider l’exploration de l’espace des solutions.Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software development paradigm that promotes the use of models as first-class artifacts and automated processes to derive other artefacts from them such as code, documentation and test cases. Model transformation is an important element of MDE since it allows to manipulate the abstract representations that are models. Model transformations, as other programs are subjects to both syntactic and semantic errors. Fixing those errors is difficult and time consuming as the transformations depend on the transformation language such as ATL, and modeling languages in which input and output models are expressed. Existing work on transformation repair targets either syntactic or semantic errors, one error at a time, and define patch templates manually. The main goal of our research is to propose a generic framework to fix multiple syntactic and semantic errors automatically. In order to achieve this goal, we reformulate the repair of model transformations as a multi-objective optimization problem and solve it by means of evolutionary algorithms. To adapt the framework to the two categories of errors, we use different types of objectives and sophisticated strategies to guide the search

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2022, which was held during April 4-5, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 17 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The proceedings also contain 3 contributions from the Test-Comp Competition. The papers deal with the foundations on which software engineering is built, including topics like software engineering as an engineering discipline, requirements engineering, software architectures, software quality, model-driven development, software processes, software evolution, AI-based software engineering, and the specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as (self-)adaptive, collaborative, AI, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, or service-oriented applications

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2022, which was held during April 4-5, 2022, in Munich, Germany, as part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2022. The 17 regular papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The proceedings also contain 3 contributions from the Test-Comp Competition. The papers deal with the foundations on which software engineering is built, including topics like software engineering as an engineering discipline, requirements engineering, software architectures, software quality, model-driven development, software processes, software evolution, AI-based software engineering, and the specification, design, and implementation of particular classes of systems, such as (self-)adaptive, collaborative, AI, embedded, distributed, mobile, pervasive, cyber-physical, or service-oriented applications

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, FASE 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The 23 full papers, 1 tool paper and 6 testing competition papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 81 submissions. The papers cover topics such as requirements engineering, software architectures, specification, software quality, validation, verification of functional and non-functional properties, model-driven development and model transformation, software processes, security and software evolution