Reusing Test-Cases on Different Levels of Abstraction in a Model Based Development Tool

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for reusing test cases across different abstraction levels in model-based development, aiming to ensure that concrete system models refine their abstract counterparts, thereby increasing confidence in system correctness.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for reusing test cases at various abstraction levels to verify model refinement in component-based development.

Findings

Framework effectively supports test case reuse across abstraction levels

Application to Adaptive Cruise Control system demonstrates practical utility

Enhances confidence in model refinement without full formal proof

Abstract

Seamless model based development aims to use models during all phases of the development process of a system. During the development process in a component-based approach, components of a system are described at qualitatively differing abstraction levels: during requirements engineering component models are rather abstract high-level and underspecified, while during implementation the component models are rather concrete and fully specified in order to enable code generation. An important issue that arises is assuring that the concrete models correspond to abstract models. In this paper, we propose a method to assure that concrete models for system components refine more abstract models for the same components. In particular we advocate a framework for reusing testcases at different abstraction levels. Our approach, even if it cannot completely prove the refinement, can be used to ensure confidence in the development process. In particular we are targeting the refinement of requirements which are represented as very abstract models. Besides a formal model of our approach, we discuss our experiences with the development of an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system in a model driven development process. This uses extensions which we implemented for our model-based development tool and which are briefly presented in this paper.