Unit Test Based Component Integration Testing

Effective and efficient testing of complex component based software systems is hard. Isolated test cases that test isolated components are focused and efficient but are not effective in detecting integration faults. Integration test cases on the other hand are hard to develop and maintain. In this paper we present an unit test based integration meta-model and testing approach, to test the integrateability of component-based systems based on structural and behavioral information derived from test executions of the respective components' unit test cases. The meta-model is formalized using the property graph model and integration criteria are presented to detect certain types of integration faults early on. Last but not least we propose an approach to derive integration tests from the data contained in the model.