Towards discovery, specification, and verification of component usage

Impediments to software quality are exacerbated when applications-under-test are developed using component-based software engineering. Component misuse is one such impediment. Component misuse occurs when a component is used in a way that differs from the component producer's expectation. This paper explores the cause of the component misuse problem and proposes a technique to discover, specify, and verify component usage. This technique utilizes regular expressions as the formalism to deal with component usage. This research is part of the software retrospector effort, which aims at a better approach to software analysis and testing for component-based software.