Component assessment using testing

Abstract

In the last years software researchers have been looking for ways of assembling systems in a style of software construction similar to “LEGO blocks”. Software components are reusable building blocks for constructing software systems. Component-based development may greatly increase the productivity of software engineers and improve the quality of software. There are many issues related with components that are of wide interest both to academics and people from industry. One of them is the retrieval of components that will be assembled into a new system. It is difficult to decide whether an implementation fits on a predefined design. In this work, we consider the problem of assessing that the implementation of a concrete component is consistent with the specification of the desired functionality. We assume that the component source code is not available and we have a formal specification of the system of interest. We propose to perform a dynamic assessment using tests derived from the specification (semantic criteria) but executed using the implementation of the candidate component.