Exploring together software architecture and software testing: A systematic mapping

Context: Software architecture and software testing have widely contributed to improve the quality of software systems, but they have been sometimes investigated in separated ways. Besides, there is a lack of work that presents an overview on how they can be combined to promote the advantages of each other. Objective: The main contribution of this paper is to characterize the state of the art on how software architecture and software testing have been explored in a complementary way. Method: For this, we conducted a systematic mapping. Results: We identified 27 studies. All of these studies have explored the use of information related to software architecture to support the testing activity. The identified approaches have covered the integration, unit, and regression phases. Moreover, functional and structural techniques were also considered. Conclusion: We observe that there is still a range of open research topics to be explored, in particular, development of new supporting tools also applied in the software industry, what could result in high-quality software systems.