An Approach Based on Modeling Dynamic Behavior of the System to Assess the Impact of COTS Upgrades

Traditional approaches of executing complete system test suite to validate software systems on deploying the upgrades of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components is typically costly and time-consuming, resulting in delay in deploying the upgrades. In this paper, we present a process that examines the test case dependencies at finer granularity level of altered-functions in the upgrades of COTS software and recommends a smaller regression test suite. The process captures and analyzes the functional-level runtime interactions among the applications and COTS components to find the impact of the upgrades on the system. The process includes a procedure to identify the altered-functions in a component. We have developed a prototype based on the concepts proposed in the paper and performed a case study on a web-based application to illustrate efficacy of the prototype. The results of the case study show that up to 80% reduction in regression test efforts could be achieved.