Research On Testing Component-Based Software Systems

The main idea of Component-Based Software Engineering(CBSE) is to use existing components for building large software systems. By enhancing the flexibility and maintainability of systems, this approach can be used to reduce software development costs, assemble systems rapidly, and reduce the maintenance burden. The features of component-based software, however, introduce new problems for testing such software. Such a feature is, for example, the absence of component source code.Firstly, this paper introduces the basic concept of software testing so that we can get better understanding for testing component-based systems.Secondly, this paper gives an overview of the component technologies. It provides some definitions of component and a classification of the existing component technologies. It also discusses the difference between components and objects, and introduces the idea of component-based development. Moreover, it addresses quality assurance issues for component-based software, and analyses the quality characteristics of components.Next, it describes issues and challenges in testing component-based software, and proposes a component specification-based test model for component-based software. The component specification contains component interface's syntax, semantics and interacting and so on, which is necessary in order to fully use the component and understand its behavior. So a tester can verify the component-based software according to its specification more easily. Furthermore, when we do integration testing for the component-based software, this paper presents component built-in testing mechanism and an approach to enhance its testability. In addition to the normal functional interface of a component, by adding a test interface that exposes the logical states of the component, a tester can dynamically monitor and capture states information and service calling sequence of the component during testing. The approach doesn't crack the encapsulation properties of a component to be tested by means of containment.Finally, the author applies the approach to test a Bank Accounts System.