When a system is composed of multi-boards, an efficient bus arbitration method for the data transfer bus must be provided for guaranteeing proper operations. In this paper, a new test methodology is developed which is used for testing on-line bus arbitration. In the new test methodology, events that are occurred during bus arbitration are defined, and expected signals during fault-free bus arbitration are compared with the signals captured during on-line bus arbitration using boundary-scan cells. For this, a new test architecture is proposed which is efficient for the maintenance and the repair of multi-board systems. In addition, the new methodology can be used with off-line interconnect test using boundary-scan.