Validation of Component-Based Software with a Customer Centric Domain Level Approach

End user testing for higher-order software compliance becomes an issue of increasing importance with compositional reuse of software artifacts. Few if any existing approaches discuss the validation of higher-order domain aspects in this context. The proposed method derives testable validation scenarios directly from a customer domain model by abstraction, reduction and inclusion for critical coverage. The resulting branch-free validation scenarios are used as references to validate suppliers´ software specifications against. Advantages of the method are first the embedding into a clear business model, second test oracles that originate from the business domains and thus are independent from models within the software development process, and third the early availability of validation results in the development cycle, before the software itself is available