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F. Thillen, R. Mordinyi, S. Biffl:
"Isolated Testing of Software Components in Distributed Software Systems";
Talk: 6th Software Quality Days, Wien; 2014-01-14 - 2014-01-16; in: "Proceedings of the 6th Software Quality Days, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing", Springer, (2014), ISBN: 978-3-319-03601-4; 170 - 184.

Component-based software engineering emphasizes the composition
of software systems through loosely coupled independent components.
Although software components are binary units of independent
software artifacts, they typically interact with other components as they
form a functioning system and thus implicitly define dependency relations.
However, in case of distributed component-based software systems
current testing strategies either assume total independence of components
or require usage of mock-up frameworks which do not facilitate
testing of the entire component but only a subset of it. Consequently,
the dependency structure between components is not really taken into account.
Therefore, those tests are limited in their effectiveness of detecting
defects in software systems with distributed components. In this paper
the "Effective Tester in the Middle" (ETM) approach is presented, which
improves testing of components depending on other distributed components.
The approach relies on test scenario specific interaction models
and network communication models which facilitate isolated testing of
entire components without the need to run the overall system. We evaluate
the approach by implementing test scenarios for a system integration
platform. The prototypic implementation demonstrates that software
testers are able to create unit test like integration tests with minimal
effort and that it increases the quality of the system by enabling the
injection of fault-messages.

Component-based Systems, Distributed Components, Component Tests.