Towards Software Component Substitutability through Black-Box Testing

ANDRÉS FLORES; MACARIO POLO

Paris, Francia

Workshop; STV’07, 5th International Workshop on Systems Testing and Validation, in conjuction with ICCSEA’07; 2007

Fraunhofer IRB Verlag

Software components have emerged to easy the assembly of software systems. However replacing or upgrading components demand a careful treatment due to stability risks on deployed systems. Replacement components must be properly evaluated to identify the required similar behaviour, for which in this paper we propose a process that complements a regular compatibility analysis with the usage of black-box testing criteria. The main goal is to satisfy the observability testing metric, which is focused on analysing functions of data transformation encapsulated on components (i.e. their behaviour). Thus for each component into a system a corresponding Component Behaviour Test Suite is built to be later applied on candidate upgrades to identify compatibility. The approach is supported through a tool developed in our group, testooj, which is focused on Java components.