Using Model-Based Testing for Testing Application Models in the Context of Domain-Specific Modelling

Domain-Specific Modelling (DSM) has evidently increased productivity and quality in software development. Although productivity and quality gains are remarkable, the modelled applications still need to be tested prior to release. Although traditional testing approaches can be applied also in the context of DSM for testing generated applications, maintaining a comprehensive test suite for all developed applications is tedious. In this paper, the feasibility of utilizing Model-Based Testing (MBT) to generate a test suite for application models is studied. The MBT is seen as a prominent approach for automatically generating comprehensive test cases from models describing externally visible behaviour of a system under testing (SUT). We study the feasibility by developing a domain-specifi c modelling language and a code generator for a coffee machine laboratorial case and apply MBT to generate a test suite for the application models. The gathered experiences indicate that there are no technical obstacles but the feasibility of the testing approach in large-scale models and languages is still questionable.