Today component engineering is gaining substantial interest in the software engineering community. Although a lot of research effort has been devoted to analysis methods and design strategies of component-based software, few papers address the testing of component-based software. The paper identifies and classifies the testing issues of software components and component-based software according to working experience.

It discusses component testability in terms of controllability, traceability, test suite, presentation, test support, and configuration management. The paper proposes a model to measure the maturity levels of a component testing process. Finally, it shares our observations and insights on test automation for component-based application systems.