State of the art in testing components

The use of components in development of complex software systems can surely have various benefits. Their testing, however, is still one of the open issues in software engineering. Both the developer of a component and the developer of a system using components often face the problem that information vital for certain development tasks is not available. Such a lack of information has various consequences to both. One of the important consequences is that it might not only obligate the developer of a system to test the components used, it might also complicate these tests. This article gives an overview of component testing approaches that explicitly respect a lack of information in development.

1 Introduction

Quality assurance, including testing, conducted in development and use of a component can be considered according to [13] from two distinct perspectives. These perspectives are those of the component provider and component user. The component provider corresponds to the role of the developer of a component and the component user to that of a client of the component provider, thus to that of the developer of a system using the component.