State-based Integration Testing For Distributed Component System

Distributed Component System (DCS) is an impotant kind of application of recent years. In order to guarentee the quality of this kind of software, sufficient and effective testing must be taken. However, distributed system and component-based software bring many difficultes for software testing. We must take new methods to deal with the problems in testing DCS.In DCS, distributed components communicate and collabrrate via the middleware to fulfil functions of a system. States and their transitons are key charactors of DCS. Usually the UML statecharts and extended state machines are used to model the dynamic behavior of the system. For the specification based software testing, these state modles are used to generate test suite.This paper proposes a methodology of state-based integration testing for DCS, formal methods are introduced into the process of testing. Firstly, we summerized the methods of specification-based software testing. Then models and ways to define software behavior are presented, especially the UML and UML communicating statecharts. Thirdly , we introduced the communicating state machines to gennerate a more precise and formal model for DCS. Based on CSM, we derive the system global state model for integration testing; Finally, we discussed the test requirements of integration testing of DCS, and transition series for testing are generated based on communication coverage and constraint coverage.The main contribution of this paper is that we introdued the methodology of state-based integration testing for distributed component system, and formal method was combined into software testing effectively. This work will contribute a lot in the practice and theory of software testing.