ProMiner: Bi-directional consistency checking framework based on system properties

Model-Driven development is currently a highly regarded software development paradigm among software developers and researchers, and model-based testing techniques are usually applied during the development to ensure the quality of software systems. With the growing size and complexity of software systems, maintaining the consistency between software models and their implementation become more and more challenging. While traditional model-based testing focuses on ensuring the software implementation comply with its designed model, this work addresses particularly the situation where the implementation is modified while software models are left outdated due to workarounds or other unexpected changes during development. The paper presents an automated consistency checking framework, ProMiner, which extends traditional model-based testing with mining software properties that represent the identified inconsistencies as linear temporal logic (LTL). Experiments show that this extended consistency checking technique effectively helps software designer to narrow down the specific locations of software models that need to be updated with respects to its running implementation.