Testing Component-Based Software: What It has to do with Design and Component Selection
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Abstract
In a component-based software development life cycle, selection of preexisting components is an important task. Every component that has to be reused has an associated risk of failure of not meeting the functional and non-functional requirements. A component's failure would lead a developer to look for some other alternative of combinations of COTS, in-house and engineered components among possible candidate combinations. This means design itself can readily change. The very process of design of a software system and component selection seems to be heavily dependent on testing results. Instability of design, further, becomes more severe due to requirements change requests. Therefore, this instability of design has to be essentially mitigated by using proper design and testing approaches, otherwise, it may lead to exorbitantly high testing cost due to the repeated testing of various alternatives. How these three activities: Component-based software design, component selection and component-based software testing are interrelated? What process model is most suited to address this concern? This work explores the above questions and their implication in terms of nature of a process model that can be convincing in case of component-based software development.
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