Testing Environment Emulation - A Model-based Approach

Modern enterprise software systems often need to interact with a large number of distributed and heterogeneous systems. As a result, integration testing has become a critical step in their software development lifecycle. Service virtualization is an emerging technique for creating testing environments with realistic executable models of server side production-like behaviours. However, building models in existing service virtualization approaches is very challenging, requiring either significant human effort or the availability of interactive tracing records. In this paper, we present a domain-specific modeling approach to generate complex, virtualized testing environments. Our approach allows domain experts to use a suite of domain-specific visual modeling languages to model key interface layers of applications at a high level of abstraction. These layered models are then transformed into a testing runtime environment for application integration testing. We have conducted a technical comparison with two other existing approaches and also carried out a user study. The user study demonstrated the acceptance of our new testing environment emulation approach from software testing experts and developers.