An Approach to Testing Black-Box Components Using Contract-Based Mutation

Component Based Software Development (CBSD) is gaining popularity in recent years. In this way of software development, software components, which are typically black-box components, are intensively reused to construct new systems. To ensure the quality of software systems composed of black-box components, a primary concern is how to ensure the quality of black-box components. Thus, adequate testing of those black-box components that will be reused is a necessary step in CBSD. However, due to the unavailability of the source code of black-box components, ensuring test adequacy becomes one of the hardest issues for testing black-box components. To tackle this problem, it is a natural idea to apply mutation testing, which is a fault-based testing method used for measuring test adequacy, for component contracts, whose aim is to improve the testability of the component. Though powerful, mutation testing is usually very computation-expensive, as many mutants need to be produced and executed in mutation testing. In this