Overlap and Synergy in Testing Software Components across Loosely Coupled Communities

Component integration rather than from-scratch programming increasingly defines software development. As a result software developers often play diverse roles, including that of a component provider -- packaging a component for others to use, a component user -- integrating other providers´ components into their software, and a component tester -- ensuring that other providers´ components work as part of an integrated system. In this paper, we explore the conjecture that we can better utilize testing resources by focusing not just on individual component-based systems, but on groups of systems that form what we refer to as loosely-coupled software development communities, meaning a set of independently-managed systems that use many of the same components. We demonstrate that such communities do in fact exist, and that there are overlaps and synergies in their test efforts.