Exploiting Cloud Computing for enabling distributed testing of complex systems: The SELEX-SI roadmap

Complex systems are usually made up of several heterogeneous components glued together to get a System of System (SoS) demanding more and more effort in terms of integration, testing and maintenance due to the number of components, as well as to the several sources of failures that rise from heterogeneity. On the other hand, the strict reliability requirements of these systems ask for massive testing campaigns since they mostly fail due to software defects that can be either triggered systematically during system execution or manifest in a transient way during its operational phase. In the SELEX-SI scenario, where systems get developed and tested across different premises distributed all over Europe, performing traditional, manual, and on-site testing becomes dramatically expensive in terms of time and human resources. Cloud computing represents the most promising way for allowing the seamless access to distributed testbed from any site and for allowing remote testing activities, either at system and integration level. A cloud based infrastructure in charge of connecting all the company premises would allow to run testing experiments from anywhere and, more important, the possibility of reproducing distributed systems deployment scenarios to run integration testing in a pre-installation phase thus dramatically reducing company costs. This paper aims to describe the i) cloud research roadmap that SELEX-SI has been designing, ii) the architectural design of the cloud infrastructure and iii) the real ROI that the company expect from introducing such an innovation into the traditional software production process.