Emerging Patterns for Testing Model Management Tools

The quality of model management tools, such as model transformation and validation tools, is of paramount importance to the adoption and success of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). To build confidence in the operational correctness of such model management tools and avoid regressions, establishing a rigorous and automated testing process is crucial. In general, model management tools consume models, produce models or both. As such, to test such a tool in a black-box manner, one needs to be able to provide test input models, and check that the operation produces the expected results. This paper contributes to the current state of practice by presenting and comparing a set of novel approaches for performing these two tasks based on our experience of testing the languages and tools of the Epsilon platform.