A defect prevention approach to architecture-based testing

Research in software architectures often marginalizes the importance of testing in relation to architectural design decisions. It is the authors' belief that testing has a pivotal role in software architectural design, in particular, defect prevention and defect detection. How effectively testing fulfills these roles is dependent on when and how the test process is introduced into the life cycle. Defect prevention requires that software test planning begin with requirements. Effective test planning requires textual and visual tools to analyze the control and data structures to be tested. Architecture-based testing presents a unique testing challenge as data and control issues must be analyzed for complex interdependencies. They introduce a generalized program graph GPG to be used with architecture-based test criteria to support analyzing architectures for test optimization. They introduce what they believe to be the salient issues in achieving defect prevention and detection for architecture-based testing. They conclude with suggestions for future work.