Coverage analysis for message flows

Application messaging focuses on enabling integration, linking and extension of business applications. This focus has led to intelligent middleware development that encompasses a modular, plug and play components approach to providing an open message broker framework. A message broker is a value-added application-to-application middleware service that comprises one or more software facilities. It is capable of one-to-many, many-to-one and many-to-many message distribution. A message broker further enables one to decompose information transformation and routing requirements into message flows, which are a series of stepwise operations that can be connected using visual composition tools. A message flow is a new programming paradigm that supports message transformation, database integration, message warehousing, and message routing. In this paper we introduce the message flow concept and its execution model. Next, we concentrate on the definition of test adequacy criteria suitable for message flows and the description of a coverage analysis tool, based on the defined coverage criteria. The coverage analysis tool collects execution details from trace files, analyzes them and presents the coverage results to the user in an intuitive manner, both visually and textually.