Testing and debugging UML models based on fUML

Model-driven development, which has recently gained momentum in academia as well as in industry, changed the software engineering process significantly from being code-centric to being model-centric. Models are considered as the key artifacts and as a result the success of the whole software development process relies on these models and their quality. Consequently, there is an urgent need for adequate methods to ensure high quality of models. Model execution can serve as the crucial basis for such methods by enabling to automatically test and debug models. Therefore, lessons learned from testing and debugging of code may serve as a valuable source of inspiration. However, the peculiarities of models in comparison to code, such as multiple views and different abstraction levels, impede the direct adoption of existing methods for models. Thus, we claim that the currently available tool support for model testing and debugging is still insufficient because these peculiarities are not adequately addressed. In this work, we aim at tackling these shortcomings by proposing a novel model execution environment based on fUML, which enables to efficiently test and debug UML models.

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