Towards the Automation of Metamorphic Testing in Model Transformations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a generic approach to automatically define and instantiate metamorphic relations for model transformations, aiming to improve testing and correctness verification in Model-Driven Engineering.

Contribution

It introduces a method to automatically generate metamorphic relations for any model transformation, addressing the oracle problem in testing.

Findings

Automated metamorphic relations can be instantiated for various model transformations.

The approach reduces manual effort in testing model transformations.

Enhances correctness verification in Model-Driven Engineering.

Abstract

Model transformations are the cornerstone of Model-Driven Engineering, and provide the essential mechanisms for manipulating and transforming models. Checking whether the output of a model transformation is correct is a manual and error-prone task, this is referred to as the oracle problem in the software testing literature. The correctness of the model transformation program is crucial for the proper generation of its output, so it should be tested. Metamorphic testing is a testing technique to alleviate the oracle problem consisting on exploiting the relations between different inputs and outputs of the program under test, so-called metamorphic relations. In this paper we give an insight into our approach to generically define metamorphic relations for model transformations, which can be automatically instantiated given any specific model transformation.