An approach to model-driven testing

The Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) aims at better software engineering by enhancing the productivity, portability and interoperability of software. To guarantee the quality of the resulting software systems, testing plays a decisive role. In this work, an approach to model-driven testing based on the idea of the MDA framework is presented. It introduces a new test modeling language and a test generation technique in order to develop both functional and real-time tests by models. The former is defined as an extension of a standardized system modeling language to facilitate test model generation from system models. The latter presumes the availability of a system model which can be reused for test specification - a prerequisite that is almost always true in modern software development processes. Through different abstraction levels, the test model can be adapted to platforms on which test code is to run. As a result, test codes that are executable on different platforms can be generated from a single model. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by testing a Bluetooth application.