The Research On COM Component Test Automation Based On XML

With the widely adoption of the components, Component-Based Software Engineering emerges as the times require. Its goal is to assembly application systems using plug-and-play software components which are either custom-built or COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) in a framework. Component-based method makes the development and maintenance of large distributed software systems easier and it can increase the software reusability and development efficiency. However, reusing software components of inferior quality may have the reverse impact, and reusing software components of superior quality incorrectly may also bring disastrous effect. So components need to be tested. Applying software test automation techniques to improve the efficiency of software testing has become the inevitable development trend of software testing, and test automation of the components has also become a necessary section. But due to the limitation of design pattern, conventional test automation techniques can not adapt to test automation of the components. So the research on COTS components test automation techniques is badly needed.XML-based COM components test automation techniques are effective test automation techniques on third-party COM components. It mainly includes COM component test automation framework and COM component automated testing tool COMCAT (COM Component Automated Test) which implements that framework. The whole framework is composed of four sections, which are, component test metadata automated retrieval and description, component test script automated generating, component test script automated executing, component test results automated verification and logging. XML techniques are fully applied to every section of component test automation. The framework combines object-oriented unit test automation framework xUnit and data-driven test framework together and makes some improvements. It also designs component metadata with plenty of content from component users and testers'view. Especially for COM components, it retrieves component metadata about structural information automatically by accessing type library and describes that with XML. It also synthetically utilizes several techniques to assist accomplishing the automation of test process. An experiment indicates that these techniques are effective and of high degree of automation and high return on investment.