A domain-specific visual modeling language for testing environment emulation

Software integration testing plays an increasingly important role as the software industry has experienced a major change from isolated applications to highly distributed computing environments. Conducting integration testing is a challenging task because it is often very difficult to replicate a real enterprise environment. Emulating testing environment is one of the key solutions to this problem. However, existing specification-based emulation techniques require manual coding of their message processing engines, therefore incurring high development cost. In this paper, we present a suite of domain-specific visual modeling languages to describe emulated testing enviroements at a high abstraction level. Our solution allows domain experts to model a testing environment from abstract interface layers. These layer models are then transformed to runtime environment for application testing. Our user study shows that our visual languages are easy to use, yet with sufficient expressive power to model complex testing applications.