Testing of model-driven development applications

Human resource management practices are key for the success of software development projects. Practices that promote knowledge sharing and organizational learning are positively related to development-effort curves, and thus software companies are looking for different alternatives oriented to promoting these practices. The model-driven development (MDD) paradigm is positioned as one of the best alternatives for reutilization of development knowledge. In particular, this paradigm considers the specification of conceptual models that can be used as input for automatic code generation to different target platforms. However, testing of applications developed through MDD solutions is still performed by the manual definition and execution of test cases by testers, which negatively impacts in the time reduction obtained from automatic code generation and the reutilization of knowledge generated during the MDD project execution. To address this issue, this paper presents a testing approach that automatically generates executable test cases for software developed by using MDD technologies.