Investigating Testing Approaches for Dynamically Adaptive Systems Work in Progress

Software systems that can automatically adapt to changes in their environments – also know as Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DAS) – play increasingly important roles in society’s everyday life. The growing demand for such systems, which range from simple mobile interactive gaming applications to complex crisis management systems, requires specific development methodologies that encompass the full software life cycle. The EU-funded DiVA project (Dynamic Variability in Complex, Adaptive Systems) [1] aims at providing a toolsupported methodology for developing DASs. The DiVA framework addresses the management of dynamic variability through a combination of aspect-oriented and model-driven techniques. Within the DiVA project context, we are interested in developing testing strategies that can adequately handle the issues involved in testing DASs. In particular, the combinatorial explosion of variant composition alternatives, many of which probably unforeseen at design time, and the runtime nature of system re-configuration, makes testing a daunting task for software developers. We started our investigation by performing a systematic mapping study of testing approaches for DASs. The goals of our survey were two: (RQ1) identifying the challenges authors have described so far in the context of DASs testing; and (RQ2) identifying candidate testing approaches which can be customised to address the challenges within the scope of the DiVA project. In regard to the research question (RQ1), we enumerated the following challenges: