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Unit Testing in ASPIDE

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Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2011, WLP 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 7773))

Abstract

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative logic programming formalism, which is employed nowadays in both academic and industrial real-world applications. Although some tools for supporting the development of ASP programs have been proposed in the last few years, the crucial task of testing ASP programs received less attention and it is an Achilles’ heel of the available programming environments. In this paper we present a language for specifying and running unit tests on ASP programs. The testing language was implemented in ASPIDE, a comprehensive IDE for ASP, which supports the entire life cycle of ASP development with a collection of user-friendly graphical tools for program composition, testing, debugging, profiling, solver execution configuration, and output handling.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an exhaustive feature-wise comparison with existing environments for developing logic programs we refer the reader to [32].

  2. 2.

    As an example, note that the semantics of a Prolog program changes if we modify the rule’s order in the program, but this is not true in ASP where rule order is immaterial. Thus, meaningful unit tests in ASP can be obtained by collecting rules without taking care of their “position” in the program, the same does not hold for Prolog.

  3. 3.

    A test conceived for verifying some functionality of an application without knowing the code internals is said to be a black-box test. A test conceived for verifying the behavior of a specific part of a program is called a white-box test. White box testing is an activity usually carried out by developers and it is a key component of agile software development [44].

  4. 4.

    Note that this definition of test case is more general than the one of [33]. Indeed, all test cases in [33] are such that: \(\mathcal U = \mathcal{P}{}\), \(\mathcal I \) is the set of ground inputs, and \(\mathcal A\) contains the assertions stating that the set of expected outputs is in \(ANS(\mathcal U \cup \mathcal I)\).

  5. 5.

    Note that the notion of DLP-Function does not allow to split the program in a unique deterministic way, thus we pragmatically decided to support this notion only for checking units.

  6. 6.

    Non-terminals are in bold face, token specifications are omitted for simplicity.

  7. 7.

    pfilter excludes the strongly negated ones, while nfilter has opposite behavior.

  8. 8.

    DLP-Functions offer a fine way of decomposing a program in modules that can be joined together to construct \(\mathcal{P}\). The interested reader is referred to [36] for a formal definition.

  9. 9.

    Space constraints prevent us from providing a complete description of all the usage scenarios and commands; rather, we focus on the testing interface presenting a specific example.

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Acknowledgments.

This work has been partially supported by the Calabrian Region under PIA (Pacchetti Integrati di Agevolazione industria, artigianato e servizi) project DLVSYSTEM approved in BURC n. 20 parte III del 15/05/2009 - DR n. 7373 del 06/05/2009.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DLVSystem s.r.l. - P.zza Vermicelli, Polo Tecnologico, 87036, Rende, Italy

    Onofrio Febbraro

  2. Dipartimento di Matematica, Università della Calabria, 87036, Rende, Italy

    Nicola Leone, Kristian Reale & Francesco Ricca

Authors
  1. Onofrio Febbraro
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  2. Nicola Leone
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  3. Kristian Reale
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  4. Francesco Ricca
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kristian Reale .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universität Wien Institut für Informationssysteme, Wien, Austria

    Hans Tompits

  2. Universidade de Évora, Evora, Portugal

    Salvador Abreu

  3. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Johannes Oetsch

  4. Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Jörg Pührer

  5. Universität Würzburg Inst. Informatik, Würzburg, Germany

    Dietmar Seipel

  6. Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Japan

    Masanobu Umeda

  7. Fraunhofer FIRST, Berlin, Germany

    Armin Wolf

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Febbraro, O., Leone, N., Reale, K., Ricca, F. (2013). Unit Testing in ASPIDE . In: Tompits, H., et al. Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management. INAP WLP 2011 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7773. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41524-1_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41524-1_21

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