Using DSLs for software testing

Abstract

In her widely cited paper about the future of software testing, Bertolino claims that domain specific languages (DSLs) have emerged as an efficient solution towards allowing experts within a domain to express specifications in that domain. She goes on the claim that success of domain-specific approaches should be built upon and extended to the testing stage of software engineering. An intuitive place to start would be to explore DSLs in the context of software testing such that languages constructed by domain experts can be leveraged to specify not only requirements but also test cases which validate those requirements. In this talk, we present and discuss the outcomes of three exploratory case studies which we carried out in order to investigate the utility of DSLs as applied to specifying tests in different domains, with each case study focusing on a particular aspect/characteristic of this application of DSLs.