Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 7, numbers 1 and 2, 2014 // View article

Testing Self-adaptive Software: Requirement Analysis and Solution Scheme

Authors:
Georg Püschel
Sebastian Götz
Claas Wilke
Christian Piechnick
Uwe Aßmann

Keywords: Self-adaptive Software; Model-based Testing; Simulation; Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

Abstract:
Self-adaptive software reconfigures automatically at run-time in order to react to environmental changes and fulfill its specified goals. Thereby, the system runs in a feedback loop which includes monitoring, analysis, adaptation planning, and execution. To assure functional correctness and non-functional adequacy, verification and validation is required. Hence, the feedback loop's tasks have to be examined as well as the adapted system behavior that spans a much more complex decision space than traditional software. To reduce the complexity for testers, models can be employed and later be used to generate test cases automatically---an approach called Model-based Testing. Alternatively, the models can be executed directly for which simulation-based validation can be employed. For both methods, an engineer has to specify validation models expressing the system's externally perceivable behavior as well as expectations derived from requirements. In this paper, we perform a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis on a generic perspective on self-adaptive software in order to derive additional requirements to be coped within test modeling. Besides functional requirements, we discuss non-functional requirements in particular. From these requirements, a reference solution scheme is derived that can be used to construct and evaluate validation methods for self-adaptive software. For illustration, we provide an example from the home robotics domain.

Pages: 88 to 100

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2014. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2014

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628