Towards a Reference Architecture for Software Testing Tools.

Abstract

Producing high quality software systems has been one of the most important software development concerns. Software testing is recognized as a fundamental activity for assuring software quality; however, it is an expensive, errorprone, and time consuming activity. For this reason, a diversity of testing tools has been developed, however, they have been almost always designed without an adequate attention to their evolution, maintenance, and reuse. In this paper, we propose an aspect-based software architecture, named RefTEST (Reference Architecture for Software Testing Tools), that comprises the knowledge to develop testing tools. This architecture is strongly based on separation of concerns and aspects, aiming at evolving, maintaining and reusing efforts to develop these tools. Our experimental results have pointed out that RefTEST can contribute to the development and reengineering of testing tools.