Formalizing integration test strategies for distributed systems

This work focuses on integration testing. For centralized systems with hierarchical structure, conventional approaches to systematically cover the constituent modules in incremental way, following a top-down or a bottom-up order, have been used. Such approaches are no longer adequate for integration testing of complex, distributed systems. We introduce here a novel approach, based on a dedicated specification formalism, called information spaces. Such approach supports a systematic decomposition of the system into sub-systems relevant for specified testing objectives, driven by both structure and information processing. By using a slicing technique over information spaces, we are able to obtain test classes which intuitively define what and where to test in order to check a given information flow between system components.