Automated Process Mining and Cause-effect Analysis for Systems Testing of Net-centric Software

In a computer network, current methods of testing network-wide software generally require manual analysis of event logs from each network node. This manual process takes excessive time, is error prone, and greatly limits percentage coverage and confidence in the target software. To expedite software evaluation and enhance its reliability, the Missile Defense Agency"s (MDA) Multi-Element Integration Test (MEIT) framework has a critical need for a network-wide, software-test framework that has enhanced coverage of the intended functionality, and provides results in real-time or near-real time. In a computer network, current methods of testing network-wide software generally require manual analysis of event logs from each network node. This manual process takes excessive time, is error prone, and greatly limits percentage coverage and confidence in the target software. To expedite software evaluation and enhance its reliability, the Missile Defense Agency"s (MDA) Multi-Element Integration Test (MEIT) framework has a critical need for a network-wide, software-test framework that has enhanced coverage of the intended functionality, and provides results in real-time or near-real time. To meet the MDA"s need, Broadata Communications, Inc. (BCI) proposes the Consolidated Open-Software Test Automation and Real-time Regression System (CO-STARRS), which is a net-centric, event-modeling tool that automatically extracts process structure from event logs. CO-STARRS provides the software developer with consolidated graphical displays of the causal links between the program structure, and structured events.