Overlap and Synergy in Testing Software Components across Loosely Coupled Communities

Component integration rather than from-scratch programming increasingly defines software development. As a result software developers often play diverse roles, including that of a component provider -- packaging a component for others to use, a component user -- integrating other providers' components into their software, and a component tester -- ensuring that other providers' components work as part of an integrated system. In this paper, we explore the conjecture that we can better utilize testing resources by focusing not just on individual component-based systems, but on groups of systems that form what we refer to as loosely-coupled software development communities, meaning a set of independently-managed systems that use many of the same components. We demonstrate that such communities do in fact exist, and that there are overlaps and synergies in their test efforts.