Toward Reflective Application Testing in Open Environments"

Abstract

Many distributed applications can be understood in terms of components interacting in an open environment such as the Internet. Open environments are subject to change in uncontrollable ways, as other applications may arrive, change, or disappear. In order to test the behavior of components in such environments, it is necessary to build a testing environment which reflects this highly unpredictable behavior. To avoid over-specification of environment components, we use the observable communication history to abstractly reflect the state of communicating components. Rewriting logic has been used to capture many different systems of concurrency and communication in an executable manner. In this paper, we show how rewriting logic models can be extended with observable communication histories in a transparent way and suggest using this extension to capture a form of assumption guarantee specification based testing of components in open environments.