Software Testing and Its Dependence on Software Architecture

Abstract: The complexity of the soft ware’s nowadays has become a central design problem. A system’s architecture provides a model of the system that suppresses implementation detail, allowing the architect to concentrate on the analysis and decisions that are most crucial to structuring the system to satisfy its requirements. This paper defines a formal technique to test software systems at the architectural level using software Architecture Description Languages (ADL).ADLs uses testable components in the architecture. The use of independent and reusable components and their inter communication issues is very much useful in designing a flexible software. Formalized software architecture description languages provide a significant opportunity for testing because they precisely describe how the software should behave in high level view, and they can be used by automated tools. The basic theme in this paper is that the software designed using a formal approach (ADLs) can enable architecture based testing which in turn will lead to a robust software design. Software architectures, particularly when defined formally using some sort of architectural description language, can provide a description of the software system that could be used for test case generation at the system level. This enables developers to abstract away the unnecessary details and focus on the big picture of the system such as system structure, high-level communication protocols, the assignment of software components and connectors to hardware components