A Practical Methodology for Integration Testing

The recognition of the importance of verification and validation tasks, within the software development process or life cycle, is growing significantly. Still, its unarguably complexity and the great amount of time and resources needed to perform testing properly, together with the industry’s unawareness of the most powerful and versatile testing tools, makes that, in practise, these activities are often underestimated and diminished, or just simply ignored and skipped, sometimes due to client’s demands or hard time-to-market constraints.

Integration testing is a specific kind of testing, which is gathering more and more attention within a software engineering industry that has been for quite some time already relying in structuring application and systems in different modules and components. In this paper, we propose a generic and re-usable model-based methodology for testing integration between different components, and illustrate it using a real case study, LiveScheduler, a scheduler and control tool for transmissions on live broadcast channels through the Internet.