Verification and Validation of Software Components and Component Based Software Systems

One premise with component based software technology is that the software component consumers, that is the software system builders, can decrease their effort needed for, among other things, verification of their component based software systems compared to traditional custom developed systems. But to reach this goal the component producers instead has to ensure a high, documented and trusted quality of their commercial components; else the effect will be the opposite. It should be easier to assemble pre-made software component into systems than to develop everything from scratch, but if a used software component is of poor quality the system verification task can be very difficult, time consuming and thereby expensive. The traditional techniques for verification and validation are still essential to ensure software quality, especially for the software component producers. Detailed specifications of the software, and thorough verifications against these specifications are ways to certify the component functionality and quality in a way that can be trusted by the component consumers. Also a defined software development process and appropriate development methods and tools ensure a high software quality. For the component consumers software verification is not like traditional verification. Software faults cannot be found and corrected by traditional debugging techniques, as most of the source code is not available. Instead a more research like technique has to be used to locate faults and workarounds has to be implemented to avoid them.