On Extracting Tests from a Testable Model in the Context of Domain Engineering

Software testing is the traditional way to verify the functionality of a given software system against its requirements. In domain engineering, these requirements consist of variabilities and commonalities observed in a domain and captured in a domain model [5]. We remark that the latter may be used to obtain an elaborate design; however tests cannot be derived from it. This observation proceeds from the fact that testing techniques relevant to single-system engineering cannot deal with the variability intrinsic to a domain. Therefore, in the context of domain engineering, we claim that there is a need for a new modeling approach enabling domain testing. We have proposed elsewhere [1, 3, 4] a testable [2] domain model (based on the domain requirements) that takes the form of generative contracts. In this paper, we present a test extraction technique applicable to this testable model. This technique generates tests for validating behavioural aspects of an implemented member of the domain against that member´s requirements. That is, upon selecting a specific member to test, the variability of domain tests is eliminated, resulting in member- specific tests, which are to be bound to artefacts of that member´s corresponding implementation in order to obtain executable tests for this member. A case study on a domain-specific testable model will illustrate the steps of our proposed test extraction technique.