The Support of Interface Specifications in Black-box Components Testing

The adequate testing of black-box components is an important basis before they will be reused in the approach of Component Based Software Development. The test-data generation and test adequacy ensuring are difficult issues for the unavailability of the source code of black-box components. In this paper, an extended component interface specification model is proposed to support the component understanding, testing and reuse. Then the function of different kinds of specification elements in testing is defined. Based on the syntactic and semantic specifications, the proposed test-data generation method can produce test suite meeting a certain mutation score, which is viewed as a kind of effective test adequacy criterion. Finally, some experiments were carried and the results have shown that the different kinds of specification can support the testing of black-box components.