Constructing self-testable software components

Component-based software engineering techniques are gaining substantial because of their potential to improve productivity and lower development costs of new software applications, yet satisfying high reliability requirements. A first step to address such high reliability requirements consists in reusing reliable components. To merit the attribute "reliable", a component should be extensively validated. As far as testing is the technique most commonly used for validation, this means that reusable components should well tested. For tests to be applied efficiently and on time, a component should be testable. This paper presents an approach to improve component testability by integrating testing resources into it, and hence obtaining a self-testable component. A prototyping tool, Concat, was developed to support the proposed approach. The tool is intended for OO components implemented in C++. Some preliminary results of an empirical evaluation of the fault detection effectiveness of the proposed testing approach are also discussed.