Modeling and Implementation of Built-In Contract Tests

Summary

Built-in contract testing is based on the idea of building tests directly into components, so that each component can assess whether it will be integrated into a suitable environment, and the environment can assess whether a newly integrated component will be acceptable.

Component technologies such as CCM, .NET, or EJB are more and more being supported by model-based approaches like the OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA). The idea is to gain considerable momentum in the development of component-based architectures through high-level modeling and automatic code generation. However, the emphasis with these approaches is currently more on system design and development and not as much on system validation and testing, so the expected reductions in component-based development in terms of time and effort can only be realized in component and application construction and not during test development. Lengthy and costly in-situ verification and acceptance testing, that is mainly still performed manually, undermines the benefits of these modern development approaches.

This chapter demonstrates how built-in contract testing can be integrated with and made to supplement automatic approaches to derive application testing from system models, represent them on the model level, and generate executable tests from these models. This model-based testing approach increases the degree of automation in generating and realizing built-in contract tests; therefore, it also increases the quality of the built-in tests and reduces the resources required for developing them.