Component-based software systems have revolutionized software development by allowing systems to be built from loosely coupled components that are developed independently. This approach allows multiple teams to develop different components in parallel which speeds up the development process and hence is favorable for a software company. Nonetheless, this approach comes with several challenges, particularly during the testing phase as preparing an environment for all interacting components is deemed to be a complex task and there are a large number of possible interactions between components to be tested. An approach called Unit Test Based Integration Testing was introduced to tackle this issue by utilizing the information obtained from unit tests of each component in order to derive integration tests between interacting components. This concept was then used as the basis for InterACt, an iterative integration testing tool. While InterACt has demonstrated its ability in the context of a scientific environment, it has yet to be tested in a real-world software development environment. Therefore, this thesis aims to evaluate the capability of InterACt in such an industrial context. Throughout this thesis, many major issues have been discovered and InterACt was constantly patched whenever possible to tackle those issues. Those issues are mainly caused by messages that are exchanged during the startup as part of the behavior of the components which are not the focus of the test, and the inflexibility of InterACt to be used against components that are developed using diverse technology stacks. The research concludes that while InterACt is not yet ready to be used, it still holds the potential in the future to be used in the industrial software landscape once those issues have been addressed.
Project information
Finished
Master
Gregorius Ian Halisantoso
2024-020