“Capturing and synthesizing the behavior of component-based systems” by Leonardo Mariani. University of Milano -- Bicocca technical report LTA:2004:01, (Milan, Italy), February 18, 2004.
Component-based system (CBS) technology facilitates flexibility: systems can be adapted, modified, and updated by adding, removing, and changing their components. Adding or modifying components require testing the components added or modified as well as all components that depend from them. Modifying components can introduce dangerous side effects that are difficult to predict, thus, in principle, we need to retest the whole system. Re-testing the whole system may be extremely expensive and sometimes not even possible. Testing effort can be reduced by selecting a subset of tests using either regression testing techniques (see for instance, [RH97, JH03]) or dependence analysis techniques (see for instance [SW01, SHR99]). Testing effort can also be reduced with run-time verification techniques that can partially substitute traditional testing (see for instance [HR02]).
This work consists on a technique reducing testing costs for CBSs. The approach, called Behavior Capture and Test (BCT), effectively combines run-time monitoring, run-time verification, and testing. We use run-time monitoring to gather data about single executions. The collected data are then used to automatically derive behavioral properties of the components and the system. The inferred properties are used for run-time verification, while single executions are used as regression test cases. BCT can be used to automatically verify the integration of components that have been used in the same or in other systems, which is a very frequent case in component-based development.
In this report we focus on verification of component-based systems, thus we will not address testing and automatic derivation of test suites.
BibTeX entry:
@techreport{Mariani2004:TR200401,
author = {Leonardo Mariani},
title = {Capturing and synthesizing the behavior of component-based
systems},
institution = {University of Milano -- Bicocca},
number = {LTA:2004:01},
address = {Milan, Italy},
month = {February~18,},
year = {2004}
}