Towards an Automated Fault Localizer while Designing Meta-models

Adel Ferdjoukh (1, 2, 3, 4) , Jean-Marie Mottu (2, 1, 5, 4)

1 LS2N - équipe NaoMod - NaoMod - Nantes Software Modeling Group
2 LS2N - Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes
3 UN UFR ST - Université de Nantes - UFR des Sciences et des Techniques
4 IMT Atlantique - DAPI - Département Automatique, Productique et Informatique
5 IUT Nantes - Institut Universitaire de Technologie - Nantes

Meta-models are the centrepiece of Model Driven Engineering, required in many activities: modelling, creating DSLs (Domain Specific Languages), xDSLs (executable DSLs), or writing model transformations. Therefore, designing meta-models should be done carefully but it could be a complicated task with large ones. Meta-models should then be validated but it is mostly done considering their usability: in particular if it is possible to instantiate them. Automatic model generators are used and if they are unable to generate models it means the meta-model with its instantiation parameters (e.g. size of the models) is wrong. Several generators exist, but most of them have binary output: success or failure, without helping the meta-model debugging. In this paper, we introduce an approach, in which we statically analyse a meta-model with its instantiation parameters. In this first work, we detect inconsistencies considering each reference or each inheritance separately. Therefore we provide feedback to the meta-model designer to help her to debug the meta-model.

Mots clés: Model Generation; Fault Localization; Meta-modelling

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Adel Ferdjoukh, Jean-Marie Mottu. Towards an Automated Fault Localizer while Designing Meta-models. MDEbug 2018, Oct 2018, Copenhagen, Denmark. ⟨hal-01962451⟩