Testing quality-of-service contracts during component integration

Quality-of-service (QoS) contracts add a new dimension to the validation of component-based systems. One important QoS aspect for real-time applications is the fulfillment of a component's response time requirements when it operates in a client-server relation with other components. This is a typical contract testing scenario in which the client component has 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 behavioural contracts between components in that way. The chapter at hand 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.