Using Component Metacontent to Support the Regression Testing of Component-Based Software

  • Authors:

  • Alessandro Orso;Mary Jean Harrold;David Rosenblum;Gregg Rothermel;Hyunsook Do;Mary Lou Soffa

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology;Georgia Institute of Technology;University of California, Irvine;Oregon State University;Oregon State University;University of Pittsburgh

  • Venue:
  • ICSM '01 Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'01)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Component-based software technologies are viewed as essential for creating the software systems of the future. However, the use of externally-provided components has serious drawbacks for a wide range of software-engineering activities, often because of a lack of information about the components. In previous work, we proposed the use of component metacontents---additional data and methods provided with a component, to support software engineering tasks. In this paper, we present two new metacontent-based techniques that address the problem of regression test selection for component-based applications: a code-based approach and a specification-based approach. First, we illustrate the two techniques. Then, we present a case study that applies the code-based technique to a real component-based system. On the system studied, on average, 26% of the overall testing effort was saved over seven releases, with a maximum savings of 99% for one version.