Critical component analyzer — A novel test prioritization framework for component based real time systems

Abstract

Component based software development system is composed of many components and it uses the reusable components as the building blocks for constructing the complex software system. The major challenges in CBS are testing component dependency that is; it is a tricky task to test each and every component for each possible input data which will lead to exhaustive testing. To reduce the cost, the industries are following some stopping criteria and release the product to the customer side. These stopping criteria will at times lead to skipping up of some of the components from rigorous testing. This will lead to hazardous side effects such as loss in terms of revenue, human life and resources. This insight leads to the need to identify critical components which have the higher dependability measure in terms of functionality and receives higher priority in testing with rigorous test procedures. Hence, this paper proposes a novel method for identifying the critical components from the Software under Test (SUT) and prioritizes them for testing with at most care based on various dependency metrics and measures among the components with the help of Component Execution Sequence Graph (CESG).