C2-Style Architecture Testing and Metrics Using Dependency Analysis

Software architecture has already become one of the primary research areas in software engineering recently and how to test software architecture automatically, effectively and adequately is a difficulty in issues about software architecture. Currently, many people are doing the research of software architecture analyze, evaluation, testing and verification techniques, and some representative testing strategies are proposed to test software architecture. But, traditional software testing methods can not be used directly to solve the test issues of software architecture, either some techniques are needed to improve the traditional methods or new software architecture testing techniques are developed to solve the test issues related to software architecture. Dependency analysis is an important method to test, analyze, understand, and maintain programs. A new kind of dependency analysis method for C2-style architecture is developed. A set of dependency relationships is defined corresponding to the relationships among C2-style architecture elements. The C2-style element dependency graph (C2-EDG) of C2-style architecture can de constructed from these dependency relationships. Based on the C2-EDG, both architecture dependency coverage testing and metrics are further given as its two applications, and discusses the equivalence of existing methods.