Using software testing to repair models

Abstract

Software testing is an important phase in the software development process, aiming at locating faults in artifacts, and achieve some confidence that the software behaves according to specification. There exists many software testing techniques applied to debugging, fault-localization, and repair of code, however, to the best of our knowledge, the application of software testing to locating faults in models and automatically repair them, is still an open issue. We present a project that investigates the use of software testing methods to automatically repair model artifacts, to support engineers in maintaining them consistent with the implementation and specification. We describe the research approach, the structure of the devised test-driven repair processes, present results in the cases of combinatorial models and feature models, and finally discuss future work of applying testing to repair models for other scenarios, such as timed automata.