Reasoning about software architecture-based regression testing through a case study

Two main issues need to be covered when dealing with the dependability of component-based systems: quality assurance of reusable software components and quality assurance of the assembled component-based system. By focussing on the assembly, a software architecture specification of a component-based system allows to explicitly model the structure and required system behavior by specifying how components and connectors are intended to interact. Software architecture-based conformance testing techniques can yield confidence on the implementation conformance to expected structural and behavioral properties as specified in the architectural models. In this paper we explore software architecture-based regression testing methods that enable reuse of earlier saved results to test if a different assembly of components conforms to the evolved software architecture. The approach is presented through a running example.