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.