Test Case Generation for Programming Language Metamodels

for Software Language Engineering 2010 Doctoral Symposium Hao Wu Supervisors: Rosemary Monahan and James F. Power Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Maynooth {haowu,rosemary,jpower}@cs.nuim.ie 1 Problem Description and Motivation One of the central themes in software language engineering is the specification of programming languages, and domain-specific languages, using a metamodel. This metamodel provides a greater degree of abstraction than a context-free grammar, since it can ignore syntactic details. However, its main benefit is in providing for the specification of the abstract syntax graph of a language, and this can then be used for the construction or generation of language processing tools. One problem associated with the use of programming language metamodels, and metamodels in general, is determining whether or not they are correct. Of course, one approach is to forward engineer code and test this, but it should also be possible to test the metamodel directly. In this context, the question addressed by our research is: given a programming language metamodel, how can we generate an appropriate test suite to show that it is valid? Being able to generate such a test suite would have two main benefits. First, examining the automatically-generated test cases would help to develop the modeller’s understanding of the metamodel, and help to increase confidence in its validity. Second, since the metamodel specifies a programming language, the generated test cases should be valid programs from that language, and these can be used as test inputs for tools that process the language.