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>Publications>Iceccs97 |
Henry Muccini
Ph.D. in Computer Science |
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{Iceccs97}
"An Approach to Integration Testing Based on Architectural Descriptions"
Antonia Bertolino, Paola Inverardi, Henry Muccini and Andrea Rosetti
IEEE Proc. ICECCS-97, Como, 1997
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Abstract:
Software architectures can play a role in improving the
testing process of complex systems. In particular, descriptions of the
software architecture can be useful to drive integration testing, since
they supply information about how the software is structured in parts
and how those parts (are expected to) interact. Exposing those problems
that arise from the combination of (successfully tested) components
is precisely the aim of integration testing. Integration testing as
we mean it here differs from``system testing" in that we specifically
intend to devise a strategy for building and testing progressively larger
subsystems starting from the single components. This strategy should
also encompass the testing of an architecture after the insertion or
the replacement of some of its components. In this paper, we propose
to use architectural descriptions to derive a model of the ``interesting"
behaviour of the system. This model is at a right level of abstraction
to be used as a formal base on which integration testing strategies
can be devised. We illustrate the proposed approach by an example. Starting
from a formal description of the software architecture (given in the
CHAM formalism), we first derive a graph of all the possible behaviours
of the system in terms of the interactions between the components. This
graph contains altogether the information we need for the planning of
integration testing. On this comprehensive model, we then identify a
suitable set of reduced graphs, whose purpose is to highlight each specific
architectural properties of the system. These reduced graphs can be
used for the generation of integration tests, analogously to what happens
with the control and data flow graphs in unit testing. |
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