Testing complex safety-critical systems in SOA context

Due to its simplicity and ease of application, testing is the main technique by which complex safety-critical systems can be verified in order to find both omission and commission bugs.Strict requirements on such systems, joined to the necessity to re-execute the test set in the regression testing campaign, provokes a test case set and testing time explosion that can be tackled only by means of the use of parallel independent testing environments. Parallelism in such environments is not easy to accomplish due to the heterogeneity of processes, methodologies and tools. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a key factor in the development of an organic modelling and execution methodology in order to build a heterogeneous and distributed environment that supports a system testing. In this paper we propose an adoption of a classical SOA reference architecture in order to address the build of such an environment for safety-critical control systems. Moreover we provide indications on the integration of SOA specific architecture components with existing centralized testing environments providing an example in signalling railway control systems.