Testing Ada 95 programs for conformance to rapide architectures

Abstract

The architecture of a system expresses the structural aspects of the system — the modules, the control structure, communication design, sharing of data and composition of modules. The architecture of a complex software system is a significant issue in the proper design, analysis and possibility of reuse of the software system.

This paper describes how the architecture of an Ada program may be extracted at run time and tested for conformance against a reference architecture in a language called RAPIDE. The conformance testing of Ada program architectures facilitates design, analysis and reuse of Ada programs since architecture based design, analysis and reuse techniques can now be applied to the program.

The paper first gives rules for testing conformance of Ada programs to RAPIDE architectures. The paper then defines a language called RAPIDE-ADA that instruments Ada programs to produce events at run time. The events are tested for conformance against a RAPIDE reference architecture by application of the rules for testing conformance.