Deriving test plans from architectural descriptions

The paper presents an approach for deriving test plans for the conformance testing of a system implementation with respect to the formal description of its Software Architecture (SA). The SA describes a system in terms of its components and connections, therefore the derived test plans address the integration testing phase. We base our approach on a Labelled Transition System (LTS) modeling the SA dynamics, and on suitable abstractions of it, the Abstract Labelled Transition Systems (ALTSs). ALTSs offer specific views of the SA dynamics by concentrating on relevant features and abstracting away from uninteresting ones. ALTS is a tool we provide to the software architect that lets him/her focus on relevant behavioral patterns and more easily identify those that are meaningful for validation purposes. Intuitively, deriving an adequate set of functional test classes means deriving a set of paths appropriately covering the ALTS. In the paper we describe our approach in the scope of a real-world case study and discuss in detail all the steps of our methodology, from ALTS identification to test plan generation.