A framework for component deployment testing

Component-based development is the emerging paradigm in software production, though several challenges still slow down its full taking up. In particular, the "component trust problem" refers to how adequate guarantees and documentation about a component's behaviour can be transferred from the component developer to its potential users. The capability to test a component when deployed within the target application environment can help establish the compliance of a candidate component to the customer's expectations and certainly contributes to "increase trust". To this purpose, we propose the CDT framework for Component Deployment Testing. CDT provides the customer with both a technique to early specify a deployment test suite and an environment for running and reusing the specified tests on any component implementation. The framework can also be used to deliver the component developer's test suite and to later re-execute it. The central feature of CDT is the complete decoupling between the specification of the tests and the component implementation.