Fusing Integration Test Management with Change Management

Infuse is an experimental software development environment focusing on change coordination during the maintenance/evolution phase of large scale software projects. Its core philosophy is to integrate strongly connected modules first and more weakly connected sets of modules later, moving up a hierarchy from singletons to clusters of interdependent modules and, finally, merging the change set into the baseline. We have previously described how Infuse enforces static consistency at each level of the hierarchy. We now extend our work to dynamic consistency — i.e., testing. Unit testing is done for the individual modules at the leaves of the hierarchy, integration testing for the intermediate clusters and acceptance testing at the root. Infuse supports this by partially automating the construction of test harnesses and regression test suites at each level of the hierarchy from components available from lower levels. Infuse is implemented for C, and is used to support its own evolution, but the implementation does not yet provide the test management described here.