Data-flow integration testing adapted to runtime evolution in component-based systems

Systems of Systems are large-scale information centric component-based systems. Because they can be more easily expressed as an information flow, they are built following the data-flow paradigm. These systems present high availability requirements that make their runtime evolution necessary. This means that integration and system testing will have to be performed at runtime as well. Already existing techniques for runtime integration and testing are usually focused on component-based systems which follow the client-server paradigm, and are not well suited for data-flow systems. In this paper we present virtual components, a way of defining units of data-flow behaviour that greatly simplifies the definition and maintenance of integration tests when the system evolves at runtime. We present and discuss an example of how to use virtual components for this purpose.

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