Behavior Capture and Test: Automated Analysis of Component Integration

Component-based technology is increasingly adopted to speed up the development of complex software through component reuse. Unfortunately, the lack of complete information about reused components, and the complex interaction patterns among components can lead to subtle problems that throw new verification challenges. Good components are often re-used many times, sometimes within product lines, in other cases across different products. The reuse of components provides a lot of information that could be useful for verification. In this paper, we show how to automatically analyze component interactions by collecting information about components’ behavior during testing and field execution, and then using the collected information for checking the compatibility of components when updated or reused in new products. The paper illustrates the main problems in developing the idea, proposes original solutions, and presents a preliminary experience that illustrates the effectiveness of the approach.