Unit Testing Non-Functional Concerns of Component-Based Distributed Systems

Unit testing component-based distributed systems traditionally involved testing functional concerns of the application logic throughout the development lifecycle. In contrast, testing non-functional distributed system concerns (e.g., end-to-end response time, security, and reliability) typically has not occurred until system integration because it requires both a complete system to perform such tests and sophisticated techniques to identify and analyze performance metrics that constitute non-functional concerns. Moreover, in a agile development environment, unit testing non-functional concerns is even harder due to the disconnect between high-level system specification and low-level performance metrics.