Research in testing COTS components - built-in testing approaches

Summary form only given. The use of components in the development of large software systems can have various benefits. Their testing, however, is still an open issue in software engineering. The user of a component is often faced with the problem that information necessary for testing purposes is not available. This lack of information distinguishes the testing of components from other software entities known from non-component-based development. This article gives an overview of the approaches to testing components. Besides the overview, this article also outlines some of the limitations of these approaches. Testing components is still an open problem.