Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Additional problems of software testing arise when applications under test are developed in the component-based approach. Component misuse is one of them. The component misuse problem occurs when a component is used in a way that differs from the component producer's expectation. This paper explores the cause of the component misuse problem and proposes a technique to discover, specify, and verify component usage. This technique utilizes regular expressions as the formalism to deal with component usage. This research is part of the software retrospector effort, which aims at a better testing solution for component-based software.