Graph Rewriting-based Model Transformation Research Articles

Formal specification and analysis of functional properties of graph rewriting‐based model transformation

SUMMARYModel processing programs are regularly used when working with models or synthetizing the code from them; therefore, their verification has become an essential component of constructing reliable software in model‐based software engineering. Models are usually formalized and visualized as graphs; therefore, model processing programs based on algebraic graph rewriting systems—such programs are called model transformations—are often applied, and their verification has become an important research area. The goal of our research is to support offline transformation analysis by automated methods, where offline means that only the definition of the program itself, the language definitions of its source and target models are used during the analysis. Therefore, the results are independent from concrete source models, and the analysis needs to be performed only once. Based on previous work, this paper provides the synthesis and of a set of individual components and improves them to provide a complete verification solution: (i) a language is introduced to specify the properties to be verified; (ii) a formalism to describe model transformations in a declarative way; and (iii) automated algorithms that can analyse the declarative transformations as well as the properties expressed by the language. Besides its theoretical basis, the implementation of a verification framework is presented, and its operation is illustrated on a case study. Although the formal verification of model transformation properties is algorithmically undecidable in general, our goal is to provide a practically usable, scoped framework that can largely facilitate the manual verification of model transformations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ICST 2010 Special Issue

This special issue contains extended versions of three papers from the Third IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2010). These papers were selected on the basis of the reviews from members of the programme committee and subsequently subjected to additional rounds of review and revision. We issued nine invitations to this special issue. Two were not selected after submission, one chose not to revise the paper after being reviewed, three never submitted a major revision, and three papers were eventually accepted. The first paper is ‘Covering and Uncovering Equivalent Mutants’ by Schuler and Zeller. The conference version won the best paper award at ICST 2010. This paper addresses the problem of identifying equivalent mutants. A study is performed on seven real-life programs to assess the percentage of equivalent mutants, which are found to range from 25% to 70%. An approach that uses changes in test coverage to detect nonequivalent mutants is proposed and demonstrated to be superior to state-of-the-art techniques. The approach is implemented as part of the open-source JAVALANCHE framework. The second paper is ‘Efficient Mutation Testing of Multithreaded Code’ by Gligoric, Jagannath, Luo and Marinov. This paper presents a framework for efficiently exploring thread schedules during mutation testing of multithreaded programs. Five techniques are presented and implemented in a tool called MuTMuT. Evaluation studies performed on 12 multithreaded programs show that the techniques can substantially reduce the time required for mutation testing of multithreaded code. The third paper is ‘Formal Specification and Analysis of Functional Properties of Graph Rewriting-based Model Transformation’ by Asztalos, Lengyel and Levendovszky. This paper proposes a language for formally specifying the functional properties of a model transformation. The model transformations are described in a declarative way. Automated algorithms are proposed to analyse the transformations. We express our thanks to the people who contributed to the success of ICST 2010 and this special issue. The steering committee members provided valuable advice, and we were assisted by industry chairs Paul Baker, Wolfgang Grieskamp, Dominique Potier and Andreas Ulrich; workshop chairs Paul Ammann, Benoit Baudry and Ina Schieferdecker; PhD Symposium chairs Atif Memon, Manuel Nunez and Fatiha Zaidi; and the general chair Marie-Claude Gaudel. Thanks go to all the reviewers who provided detailed and timely reviews for the ICST submissions as well as the manuscripts submitted to the special issue. We are also indebted to the ICST 2010 publicity chairs Khaled El-Fakih, Vahid Garousi, Yves Le Traon and Elaine Martins and the Web chair Stephane Maag. We thank the authors for sharing their ideas and results with us. Finally, thanks go to editors-in-chief Jeff Offutt and Robert Hierons for their support and enthusiasm. ANA CAVALLI SUDIPTO GHOSH Co-chairs, Technical Program Committee ICST 2010 10 May 2013