UML-Based Integration Testing for Component-Based Software

Component-based software engineering is increasingly being adopted for software development. Currently, components delivered by component providers only include specifications of the interfaces. This imposes significant dificulties on adequate testing of an integrated component-based system. Without source code, many testing techniques will not be applicable. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely adopted in component-based software development processes. Many of its useful tools, such as interaction diagrams, statechart diagrams, and component diagrams, characterize the behavior of components in various aspects, and thus can be used to help test componentbased systems. In this paper, we first analyze different test elements that are critical to test component-based software, then we propose a group of UML-based test adequacy criteria that can be used to test componentbased software.