Governing Regression Testing in Systems of Systems

Great advances in network technology and software
engineering have triggered the development and spread of Systems
of Systems (SoSs). The dynamic and evolvable nature of
SoSs poses important challenges on the validation of such systems
and in particular on their regression testing, aiming at assessing
that run-time changes and evolutions do not introduce regression
in SoS behavior. This paper outlines issues and challenges of
regression testing of SoSs, identifying the main kinds of evolution
that can impact on their regression testing activity. Furthermore,
it presents a conceptual framework for governing the regression
testing of SoSs. The proposed framework leverages the concept
of an orchestration graph that describes the flow of test cases and
sketches a solution for deriving a regression test plan according
to test cases dependencies.