On Building Testable Software Components

Component engineering is gaining substantial interest in the software engineering community. A lot of research efforts have been devoted to the analysis and design methods for component-based software. However, only few papers address the testing of software components and component-based software. This paper focuses on how to build testable software components by increasing the testability of software components. The paper introduces the concept of testable bean, and proposes a new way to construct a testable bean based on a testable architecture and well-defined built-in interfaces. In addition, the paper also reports our efforts on developing a test bed to achieve automation for test beans.