The design of dependency relationships matrix to improve the testability of component-based software

Component-based software development technique and its intensive use in the industry has led to the wide research in various aspects of component-based systems(CBSs). And its relating quality assurance techniques had become the key research content. This paper summarizes eight types of dependency between two components in the CBSs. And it discusses about a dependency-based representation called the component dependency graph(CDG) and the component direct dependency graph(CDDG), and then gives the definition of dependency relationship matrix of the component C-m(CmDM) and detailed dependency relationship matrix of the component C-m(CmDDM). Based on these, we further present two approaches to find dependencies relationships between two components: code-based approach and specification-based approach. Finally, we apply an application example implementing integration testing when a component named RegisterGrade is integrated into a CBS, and present a table with test coverage figure to illustrate the validity of our approach.