Architecting fault-tolerant component-based systems: from requirements to testing

Fault tolerance is one of the most important means to avoid service failure in the presence of faults, so to guarantee they will not interrupt the service delivery. Software testing, instead, is one of the major fault removal techniques, realized in order to detect and remove software faults during software development so that they will not be present in the final product. This paper shows how fault tolerance and testing can be used to validate component-based systems. Fault tolerance requirements guide the construction of a fault-tolerant architecture, which is successively validated with respect to requirements and submitted to testing. The theory is applied over a mining control system running example.