Governing Regression Testing in Systems of Systems

Great advances in network technology and software engineering have triggered the development and spread of Systems of Systems (SoSs). The dynamic and evolvable nature of SoSs poses important challenges on the validation of such systems and in particular on their regression testing, aiming at assessing that run-time changes and evolutions do not introduce regression in SoS behavior. This paper outlines issues and challenges of regression testing of SoSs, identifying the main kinds of evolution that can impact on their regression testing activity. Furthermore, it presents a conceptual framework for governing the regression testing of SoSs. The proposed framework leverages the concept of an orchestration graph that describes the flow of test cases and sketches a solution for deriving a regression test plan according to test cases dependencies.