A Tool for Re-verifying Reusable Software Components

This research focuses on reducing the amount of re-verification necessary for reusable software components The work addresses a fundamental problem facing the reuse of software: when a software component that has been verified to a given level of reliability in one environment is reused in another, how can we assess the same level of reliability for the component with the minimum amount of re-verification. Through solving this issue, software development and maintenance will realize the time and cost benefits of software reuse. Our approach to solving this problem is to collect internal data state information during verification. By collecting this information, along with the output produced by the state, we are able to ess whenever a data state created during re-verification is identical to one already collected during verification. When this occurs, we are able to immediately halt the current test case since we already know the outcome of the test. This method of shortcircuiting the re-verification process will have tremendous time and cost impacts for those components where this technique can be applied near the beginning of the component's execution. BENEFITS: This research will benefit all government and commercial software developers by reducing the cost of using reusable software components.