Software Test Engineering Analysis

Trace semantics is a technology being used successfully to test and verify software, and has generated much interest and research. As modern software systems get more complex, being made up of multiple components from various vendors, trace semantics gets harder to apply. One way to work around these issues to apply the technologies is to instrument the communications interfaces between the components of the system. This can often be done in a passive, non-intrusive manner to generate test traces from a running system that can then be used to generate workflow models and predicate abstractions. Our solution involves building a complete instrumented test framework comprising empirical instrumented observations. Instrumentation is non-intrusive using lightweight agents to instrument predicates via the Operating System (OS) layer and common middleware protocols. This approach enables component instrumentation without having to compile or link code with the component itself, an absolute need in today"s distributed system-of-systems comprising of disparate OS"s, languages and interfaces. The agents transfer predicate values to the Control GUI over an open API to allow third-party agent development and deployment. The GUI records the instrumented data in a Database. A Test Viewer is used to compare the recorded predicate traces.