The component testability is an important attribute to evaluate the quality of a given software product and exposes the degree to which a software artifact facilitates the testing process. A lower degree of testability results in increase test effort. Depending on the methods used, testing activities account for 25% to 90% of total project effort [1, 2, 3, 4].
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Components and software with good testability not only increase the quality of software, but also reduce the cost of software development and testing. According to [1], software testing usually costs more than 40% of the software project budget during the life cycle of a software product. Thus, designing highly testable software components becomes a very important and challenging task for component developers. Similarly, verifying and measuring the testability and quality of software components is also very important and challenging for application engineers and component users.
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The increasing visibility of software as a system element and the attendant “costs” associated with a software failure are motivating forces for well-planned, thorough testing. It is not unusual for a software development organization to expend 40 percent of total project effort on testing. In the extreme, the testing of human-rated software (e.g., flight control, nuclear reactor monitoring) can cost three to five times as much as all other software engineering steps combined! [2].
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Evaluation and testing procedures have a high cost in practice (expenditures in this sector are estimated to be 25% to 50% of the software development time and cost [3].
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Historically, the process of identifying and correcting defects during the software development process represents over half of development costs. Depending on the accounting methods used, testing activities account for 30 to 90 percent of labor expended to produce a working program [4].
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REFERENCES
[1] S. Jungmayr, “Reviewing Software Artifacts for Testability”, Proc. of EuroSTAR’99, Barcelona, Spain, November 10-12, 1999.
[2] R. S. Pressman, “Software Engineering: Practitioner’s Approach”, European 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill Book Company, Berkshire, England, 1994, pp. 609.
[3] T. Koomen, M. Pol, “Test Process Improvement: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Structured Testing”, Addison-Wesley, 1999.
[4] B. Beizer, “Software Testing Techniques”, International Thomson Computer Press, Boston, 1990.
