In this talk, I will focus on a connection between stable-failures refinement and the ioco conformance relation. Both behavioural relations underlie methodologies that have gained traction in industry: stable-failures refinement is used in several commercial Model-Driven Engineering tool suites, whereas the ioco conformance relation is used in Model-Based Testing tools.

Refinement-based Model-Driven Engineering approaches promise to generate executable code from high-level models, thus guaranteeing that the code upholds specified behavioural contracts. Manual testing, however, is still required to gain confidence that the model-to-code transformation and the execution platform do not lead to unexpected contract violations.

We identify conditions under which also this last step in the design methodology can be automated using the ioco conformance relation and the associated tools.

Joint work with Flip van Spaendonck