A Novel Approach to Mutation Operator Design for MDE Languages

Due to the increasing reliance on the software of systems, such as enterprise systems, a wide array of approaches has been found to facilitate the development of software for such systems. The growth of system complexity, however, has provoked concerns about the quality of the software. One approach that copes with complexity is model driven engineering that uses models containing only essential domain concepts, in order to represent complex systems. With some level of automation, models are then maintained by programs that are prone to error, as they are man-made. In order to find errors in programs, software engineers use mutation testing to build strong test inputs by introducing faults into the tested software using mutation operators. They then study if the introduced faults are detected by the test inputs. There have been few attempts to design mutation operators for model driven languages, which have common metamodeling language models, compared with traditional programming languages. This thesis presents an effective language-agnostic approach for mutation operator design for the rapidly emerging model driven engineering languages by considering metamodeling languages. The approach produces generic operators that can be instantiated to generate concrete ones for a given language model, which can be used to mutate program models that conform to the language model. The approach and generic operators are evaluated using empirical mutation analysis experiments over programs written in the ATL and EOL languages. The results show that the generic operators generated from the approach are instantiatable over ATL and EOL metamodels and have produced low proportions of invalid and equivalent mutants that can impact negatively on any mutation testing process. Also, the generic operators have produced useful mutants such as live and not trivially detected kinds of mutants

A Systematic Approach for Designing Mutation Operators for MDE languages

Testing is an essential activity in software development, used to increase confidence in the quality of software. One testing approach that is used to evaluate the quality of testing inputs for a particular program is mutation analysis. The most important step in mutation analysis is the process of defining mutation operators that mimic typical errors of the users of a language. There is a wide variety of mutation operators that have been designed for a number of languages including C, Java, and SQL. However, the design of mutation operators is rarely systematic, which may result in passing over crucial operators for specific features of languages. This paper describes a way to apply mutation analysis in the context of Model Driven Engineering (MDE). In particular, the paper proposes a systematic approach for designing mutation operators for MDE languages. The systematic approach is demonstrated for the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) and the result is a list of mutation operators that includes previously designed ones for ATL from the literature