Assessing Real-Time Component Contracts Through Built-in Evolutionary Testing

Real-time contracts between components, as an important aspect of quality-of-service considerations, add a new dimension to the development and validation of component-based embedded systems. A real-time contract determines the fulfillment of a component’s response time requirements when it operates in a client-server relation with other components. This represents a typical contract testing scenario in which the client component needs to assess the timely response of an associated server component according to its usage profile of that server. The basic model of built-in contract testing technology is capable of assessing the correctness of behavioral contracts between components in this way. This chapter introduces an extension to the basic built-in contract testing model that puts components into the position to assess their deployment environment with respect to response time specifications. This extended model of built-in contract testing requires some additional built-in test architecture for components plus an automatic test case generator that is based on search heuristics.