Verification support for generative system development

Abstract

The automated generation of systems (e.g. within model-driven development) is a considerable improvement of the software development. However, besides the automated generation the verification of these generated systems needs to be supported, too. By applying generators it is not necessarily guaranteed that the generation outcome is correct. Typical problems may be, firstly, the use of a wrong operator resulting in an erroneous generation (static aspects of the generation). Secondly, the interactions between the different generated system assets (snippets) of the generated outcome might be incorrect, since the snippets might be connected in a wrong sequence (dynamic aspect of the generation). Therefore, the hierarchical dependencies of the snippets which are the input of the generator as well as the dynamic behavior resulting from the generation have to be checked. We describe the hierarchy in a version model based on Boolean logic. The temporal behavior may be checked by model checkers. For the generation we apply our XOpT concept which provides domain-specific transformation operators on the XML representation. Besides the principles of the static and dynamic elements of our checking approach the paper presents the way to map program assets to the version model and to finite state automata which are the prerequisite for the checking. Though the proposed checking is presented at the code level the approach may be applied to different kinds of assets, e.g. also on the model level. © 2009 IOS Press. All rights reserved.