Black-box evaluation of COTS components using aspects and metadata

Current approaches to automated black-box testing of components tend to focus on reducing the effort required to reveal component's properties by partially automating interface probing. This often leads to the development of test cases, which make too many assumptions about interfaces. Aspect-oriented component engineering uses the concept of different system capabilities to reason about component provided and required services. Aspect information is used to help implement better component interfaces and to encode knowledge of a component's capability. We describe and illustrate a proposal on the use of aspect-oriented component engineering techniques and notations to search for components inputs on which the component properties are revealed using a combination of existing test generation methods for black-box testing and a categorisation of component services.