Black-box understanding of COTS components

Developers have to identify properties of COTS components to properly integrate them with a system under development, but COTS components are typically "black boxes" because their source code is not available. We present an approach that can be used in black-box understanding of COTS components. The major objective is to reduce the effort required to reveal component properties by partially automating interface probing. A developer provides a full or partial description of a component property, together with a search scope where assertions are used to describe component properties. Based on this information, a search engine automatically searches for component inputs on which the component property is revealed using a combination of existing automated test generation methods for black-box testing and for white-box testing. Our initial experience has shown that this approach may be a cost-effective way of revealing properties of components.