A domain-specific modeling approach for testing environment emulation

Software integration testing is a critical step in the software development lifecycle, as modern software systems often need to interact with many other distributed and heterogeneous systems. However, conducting integration testing is a challenging task because application production environments are generally neither suitable nor available to enable testing services. Additionally, replicating such environments for integration testing is usually very costly. Testing environment emulation is an emerging technique for creating integration testing environments with executable models of server side production-like behaviors. Aiming to achieve high development productivity and ease of use for business users, we propose a novel domain-specific modeling approach for testing environment emulation. Our approach is based on model-driven engineering, and abstracts software service interfaces, or endpoints, into different request message processing layers. Each of these layers represents a modeling problem domain. To model endpoints, we develop a suite of domain-specific visual languages for modeling these interface layers. To build a testing environment, we have created a supporting toolset to transform endpoint models to executable forms automatically. We provide a set of example scenarios to demonstrate the capabilities of our approach. We have also conducted a user study that demonstrates the acceptance of our approach by IT professionals and business users.