Data-flow integration testing adapted to runtime evolution in component-based systems. Paper presented at

Systems of Systems are large-scale information centric component-based systems. Because they can be more easily expressed as an information flow, they are built following the data-flow paradigm. These systems present high avail-ability requirements that make their runtime evolution nec-essary. This means that integration and system testing will have to be performed at runtime as well. Already exist-ing techniques for runtime integration and testing are usu-ally focused on component-based systems which follow the client-server paradigm, and are not well suited for data-flow systems. In this paper we present virtual components, a way of defining units of data-flow behaviour that greatly simpli-fies the definition and maintenance of integration tests when the system evolves at runtime. We present and discuss an example of how to use virtual components for this purpose