Testing Domain specific languages

Question

I have developed a graphical domain specific language. I want to use this for model based design. I have a number of graphical components which have abstract information about the domain and these components are used to implement my algorithms.

Can anyone please tell me if there is an alternative to conventional unit testing for testing these graphical components. Unit testing these blocks is fairly straight forward, but I feel its quite time consuming and redundant for my application. Hence, I am looking for alternatives.

Any suggestion will be appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Simplest way is to use tools for creating graphical domain-specific languages. Those tools not only help in defining the language, but also provide built-in checks and the best allow you to test your language while you define it at the same time. For a survey on these tools see http://www.languageworkbenches.net/past-editions/

Answer 2

This depends on the technology that you used to create your DSL. If you used Xtext to build the language, there is the Xpect framework to write nice acceptance tests for your implementation.