Software architecture-based analysis and testing: a look into achievements and future challenges

The term software architecture (SA) has been introduced to denote the high level structure of a software system. SA has been proposed as a means for managing complexity and improving reuse, by supporting the decomposition of a system into its high level components and their interconnections. Over the years, the SA scope has evolved, and today it also captures the architecturally-relevant decisions behind design taken by a variety of stakeholders to satisfy their own specific concerns, and codified into different views and viewpoints. SAs have also been advocated as a means for improving the dependability of complex software systems. In this light, different methods have been proposed on the one side for assessing the correctness of architectural decisions with respect to system goals and requirements, and on the other as a reference model to drive a more effective system design and implementation. In this paper, we report on those that we consider the most relevant advances in the field of architecture-based testing and analysis over the years. We do this based on our own journey in this topic, which we ourselves contributed to stir and shape.