Systematic Testing of Software Architectures in the C2 Style

The topic of software architecture (SA) based testing has recently raised some interest. Recent work on the topic has used the SA as a reference model for code conformance testing, to check if an implementation fulfills (conforms to) its specification at the SA level. In this context, on previous papers, we have analyzed: i) how suitable test cases can be “selected” from the SA specification and ii) how they may be “refined” into concrete tests executable at the code level. While the selection stage has been done systematically, the refinement step has been left to be done manually, based on the software engineer knowledge on how to map “abstract values of the specification to the concrete values of the implementation”. In this paper, we extend previous approaches, by providing a systematic way to perform the refinement step. We show how choosing a specific architectural style, which supports implementation and facilitates the mapping among SA-based and code-based test cases, a completely systematic SA-based testing approach can be delivered.