Integrating Testing into the Alloy Model Development Workflow
Allison Sullivan · 2023
Software models help improve the reliability of software systems: models can convey requirements, and can analyze design and implementation properties. A key strength of Alloy, a commonly used modeling language, is the Alloy Analyzer toolset. The Analyzer is an automated analysis engine that searches for all valid instances, which are assignments to the sets of the model such that all executed formulas hold, up to a user-provided scope. Unfortunately, despite the Analyzer, writing correct models remains a difficult and error-prone task. To address this, a unit testing framework, AUnit, was created for Alloy. Since then, several traditional imperative testing practices, including mutation testing, fault localization and repair, have been established for Alloy models. Prior work has introduced the feasibility of these approaches and produced command line prototype tools. This paper highlights the effort to translate these research products into the Analyzer, the main model development tool for Alloy, to produce one consolidated integrated development environment that provides robust testing support.