Using traceability links and higher-order transformations for easing regression testing of web applications

  • Authors:
  • Piero Fraternali;Massimo Tisi

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Elettronica ed Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;AtlanMod, INRIA & Ecole des Mines de Nantes, Nantes Cedex 3, France

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

For Model-Driven Engineering to become widely accepted by developers, it is necessarythat its principles and techniques be applied not only to the generation of code from Plat-form Independent Models (PIMs), but more generally to all the phases of the softwarelife-cycle. This paper focuses on the use of PIMs to support automation in the regres-sion testing phase of a system; the proposed framework lets developers record and replaytesting sessions and investigate testing failures at the level of their PIMs; this is madepossible by traceability links automatically weaved into the generated code, wherebydevelopers can follow application execution at the model level. Such traceability linksare created by a modified version of the code generation transformation, automaticallyproduced by means of a Higher-Order Transformation (HOT). A HOT is a transfor-mation that takes as input a transformation (the original code generator) and createsanother transformation (the code generator capable of producing traceability links). TheHOT weaves into the code generator additional rules producing traceability clues thathelp developers link any error to the model features likely to cause it. This approachis particularly helpful in the Web context, where code generation transformations mustfollow changes in the technology and presentation styles. Using HOTs ensures the au-tomatic evolution of the transformation for traceability links when the code generationtransformation changes.