Design for Testability of Software Components

Component engineering is gaining substantial interest in the software engineering community. A lot of researchefforts have been devoted to the analysis and design methods for component-based software. However, only fewpapers address component testability issues and solutions for and solutions for component-based software. Thispaper focuses on how to increase component testability using a systematic approach to generate testable softwarecomponents. It introduces the new concept of testa ble components, and discusses its perspectives and theapproaches to increase component testability. The major contribution of this paper is its systematic method toconstruct testable components based on the given COTS or in-house components. With this method, varioussoftware components could be validated using a general component test bed and common component testframework in a systematic manner. The given application examples and case study results show the strongpotential of using this solution to achieve component test automation. In addition, the development of a generalcomponent test bed is also reported. ble components, and discusses its perspectives and theapproaches to increase component testability. The major contribution of this paper is its systematic method toconstruct testable components based on the given COTS or in-house components. With this method, varioussoftware components could be validated using a general component test bed and common component testframework in a systematic manner. The given application examples and case study results show the strongpotential of using this solution to achieve component test automation. In addition, the development of a generalcomponent test bed is also reported.