Built-in Regression Testing for Component-based Software Systems

Some specialties of component, such as high evolvability, implementation transparent, and limited access support, bring a great challenge for testing the systems built by externally-provided components, especially for regression testing. Built-in test design is a fairly effective way to improve component's testability. In this paper, we present a built-in regression testing method to validate the change and its impact of component-based software, which needs the mutual collaboration between the component developers and component users. Through employing preliminary experiments on some medium scale systems, our regression testing method based on built-in test design has been proven to be feasible and practical. Although our method indicates the same precision as Orso et al. 's method at statement level, it needs less exchanged information (i.e., meta-data) and test scripts, so it is more cost-effective.