Coupling-based Criteria for Integration Testing

Integration testing is an important part of the testing process, but few integration testing techniques have been systematically studied or defined. The goal of this research is to develop practical, effective, formalizable, automatable techniques for testing of connections between components during software integration. This paper presents an integration testing technique that is based on couplings between software components. This technique can be used to support integration testing of software components, and satisfies part of the USA’s Federal Aviation Authority’s requirements for structural coverage analysis of software. The coupling-based testing technique is described, and the coverage criteria for three types of couplings are defined. Techniques and algorithms for developing coverage analysers to measure the extent to which a test set satisfies the criteria are presented, and results from a comparative case study are presented.  1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.