Research On Component-Based Software Testing

Nowadays, component and Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) is gaining substantial interest in the software engineering community. A component-based approach can simplify the design and maintenance of large software systems and increase the opportunities for reuse and software development productivity. However, software components with poor quality or improper use of software components with good quality may lead to disasters.Currently, components delivered by component providers as executable objects in black boxes only include specifications of the interfaces. Without source code, many traditional software testing methods can not be applied to component testing. Unavailability of source code brings new challenges for component testing. Although a lot of research effort has been devoted to design strategies and retrieval methods of components, a few papers address issues of component testing.In this paper, we first put forward the concept of software component and give an introduction to the component model, i.e., CORBA, COM and EJB. Based on the concept of component, Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) is introduced together with brief description of each process in CBSD.Furthermore, by looking back on the traditional software testing technologies, we give an overview of state of the art of component and component-based software testing challenges, technologies, standard for testing components and component testability.We have developed an approach for determining the quality of components using a set of black-box analyses based on function domain partition and defined a component testing process, which can be used for software component testing. We also extend contract-based built-in tests where components are equipped with the ability to check their execution environment at run-time with the model-based approaches. This model-based approach, which is designed for component integration testing, can increase the automation level in generating and realizing built-in tests.Finally, a summary of this dissertation and future research plan is given in the last section.