A systematic approach for designing mutation operators for MDE languages

Testing is an essential activity in software development, used to increase confidence in the quality of software. One testing approach that is used to evaluate the quality of testing inputs for a particular program is mutation analysis. The most important step in mutation analysis is the process of defining mutation operators that mimic typical errors of the users of a language. There is a wide variety of mutation operators that have been designed for a number of languages including C, Java, and SQL. However, the design of mutation operators is rarely systematic, which may result in passing over crucial operators for specific features of languages. This paper describes a way to apply mutation analysis in the context of Model Driven Engineering (MDE). In particular, the paper proposes a systematic approach for designing mutation operators for MDE languages. The systematic approach is demonstrated for the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) and the result is a list of mutation operators that includes previously designed ones for ATL from the literature.