Software Component Test Cases: The Need for a Conceptual Taxonomy
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Abstract:
Component-based software engineering is becoming an increasingly popular endeavor, in part because of the perceived gains in terms of software reuse. However, we feel that for component engineering to be successful in fully exploiting reuse opportunities, components must be independent of the processes used to derive them. That is, there should be standard canonical forms for software artifacts that do not carry with them the baggage associated with a particular development methodology or process. This is the type of effort associated with the rapidly emerging discipline of software architecture, and would make the notion of "software component" much more like the analogous "hardware component " concept from hardware engineering. In this paper, we outline some initial modest ideas with regard to capturing a process-independent notion of a component "test case. " Ultimately, the idea behind this work is to produce a complete conceptual framework for understanding test cases as objects. Such a framework would support the specification and reuse of test cases as part of a standardized component architecture.
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