A Component Testing Approach Supported By a CASE Tool

The reuse of assets instead of building them from scratch, a process generally known as software reuse, can be considered a good option of competitive advantage for software development companies. In this context, component-based development has been one of the most used techniques applied to promote software reuse, establishing a promising component market. However, the main consolidate methods to develop components are more aware in demonstrating component development as a feasible approach and some important activities, for example, related to quality, and more specifically, to testing, are sometimes neglected. Component producers have difficulties to design their products to work properly on different contexts of use, as well as to prepare their products to be validated by third party. In the same way, component consumers have limitations to test if external components, these ones addressing specific needs of their systems under development, work as specified, and if they are able to work integrated with their systems. This book has the mission to present an approach to support component testing defining activities to be performed by component producers and component consumers.