December 9, 2010—The SEI’s Architecture-Centric Engineering (ACE) Initiative recently launched a new research project called architecture-based testing, which means using a system’s architecture to inform and guide the system’s testing activities. The SEI is inviting community feedback on the project.

“While there has been substantial work devoted to this topic in the research community, not much of that research seems to have filtered into communities of practitioners,” wrote Paul Clements of the SEI in the SEI Architecture Technology User Network (SATURN) blog. “Hence, the promise of architecture-based testing—to use architecture to reduce the time and expense of testing and to increase its effectiveness—remains unfulfilled.”

The overall goal of the project is to help answer how to better use architecture to help test systems. Researchers leading the project say the community can help in two ways:

1. by helping ACE capture architectural approaches for designing testable systems
2. by submitting what is considered a “model problem” in architecture-based testing

The initiative also invites comments and opinions about the project or suggestions about future work in this area. All comments or submissions may be made through links at the SATURN blog.