Abstract
Although broadly used in many application domains, the use of reflection in safety-critical systems remains questionable due to the little work reporting on validation aspects. This paper defines an approach for testing MetaObject Protocols (MOPs) generated using open compiler facilities. These protocols are defined in terms of a set of analysis and generation rules, which are used to specialize the MOP implementation according to the features supplied by object definitions. The proposed test strategy classifies these analyses and generation rules. Testing objectives and conformance checks are defined for each type of rule. Along the paper, the approach will be illustrated through a real MOP implemented using OpenC++ and extracted from the FRIENDS architecture, an architecture devoted to the implementation of faulttolerant systems. The test experiments performed show the interest of the strategy since they have revealed some errors in the considered protocol implementation.
This work was supported in part by France-Telecom (contract ST.CNET/DTL/ASR/97049/DT) and the European Community (project IS-1999-11585: DSOS - Dependable Systems of Systems).
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Ruiz, J.C., Fabre, JC., Thévenod-Fosse, P. (2001). Testing MetaObject Protocols Generated by Open Compilers for Safety-Critical Systems. In: Yonezawa, A., Matsuoka, S. (eds) Metalevel Architectures and Separation of Crosscutting Concerns. Reflection 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2192. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45429-2_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45429-2_11
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