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Grant support

This work has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No 813884, by the Austrian Science Fund (P 30525-N31) , and by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development (CDG) . Special gratitude to Javier Troya for putting his implementation of SFBL for model transformations as open source, and to Pablo Gomez-Abajo for his active support of the WODEL model mutation testing tool.

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Garmendia, AntonioAuthor

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February 20, 2025
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A language-parametric test coverage framework for executable domain-specific languages

Publicated to:JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE. 211 111977- - 2024-02-08 211(), DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2024.111977

Authors: Khorram, Faezeh; Bousse, Erwan; Garmendia, Antonio; Mottu, Jean-Marie; Sunye, Gerson; Wimmer, Manuel

Affiliations

Johannes Kepler Univ Linz, Inst Business Informat Software Engn, CDL MINT, Linz, Austria - Author
Nantes Univ, Ecole Cent Nantes, IMT Atlantique, Nantes, France - Author
Univ Autonoma Madrid, Dept Ingn Informat, Madrid, Spain - Author
Univ Rennes, CNRS, Rennes, France - Author

Abstract

Test coverage is an effective technique to measure test case quality and to enable fault localization. However, for Executable Domain -Specific Languages (xDSLs), coverage metrics and associated tools are currently manually defined for each xDSL resulting in costly, error -prone, and non -reusable work. To address this problem, we propose a novel language -parametric test coverage framework for xDSLs. We define two coverage metrics adapted to xDSLs: model element and branch coverage. For performing coverage measurements, we propose a generic technique which can be used out -of -the -box by domain experts using any xDSL to define, execute, and test models. In addition, the coverage of model elements and branches can be parameterized for a given xDSL through the definition of coverage rules using a dedicated language. We showcase two test coverage applications for xDSLs: measuring the quality of test suites for executable models and localizing the models' faults using Spectrum -Based Fault Localization techniques. We evaluate our approach using four different xDSLs. Results show that (i) we can generate meaningful coverage measurements for all investigated models, (ii) the provided coverage rule language enables framework parameterization for all xDSLs, and (iii) the computed coverage measurements are useful in identifying defects of the models.

Keywords

Quality index

Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-07-19:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 3.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 4 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 0.5.
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 1 (Altmetric).

Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Austria; France.