Testing coupling relationships in object‐oriented programs

Abstract

As we move toward developing object‐oriented (OO) programs, the complexity traditionally found in functions and procedures is moving to the connections among components. Different faults occur when components are integrated to form higher‐level structures that aggregate the behavior and state. Consequently, we need to place more effort on testing the connections among components. Although OO technologies provide abstraction mechanisms for building components that can then be integrated to form applications, it also adds new compositional relations that can contain faults. This paper describes techniques for analyzing and testing the polymorphic relationships that occur in OO software. The techniques adapt traditional data flow coverage criteria to consider definitions and uses among state variables of classes, particularly in the presence of inheritance, dynamic binding, and polymorphic overriding of state variables and methods. The application of these techniques can result in an increased ability to find faults and to create an overall higher quality software. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Automated Test Data Generation for Coupling Based Integration Testing of Object Oriented Programs Using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)

“…First, their criteria are coarse-grained. The criteria presented by Alexander and Offutt [39,40] are a superset of those of Chen and Kao. Kung et al observe that one of the key difficulties in testing OO software understands the relationships that exist among the components [25].…”

“…We used the classification of coupling types of object oriented programs identified by Alexander and Offutt and generates the test data for each coupling type using particle swarm optimization. Our proposed approach takes the coupling path as input and generates the test data for that path [39,40,41].…”

On the Right Objectives of Data Flow Testing

“…Initially data flow testing criteria have been proposed as alternative approaches to classic control flow testing criteria, aiming at more thorough test suites [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. Lately there has been increasing emphasis on the applications of data flow testing to object oriented systems where the focus is on object interactions both at intra-and inter-class levels [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16]. Unfortunately, despite the huge body of research, the experimental data about the effectiveness of data flow testing are still contradictory and inconclusive [6], [7], [8], [9], [17], [18], [19], [20].…”

Syntactic fault patterns in OO programs

“…Variables are defined through direct reference, such as in an assignment statement, or indirectly by calling state defining methods (if the variable is a reference to an object). 1 Similarly, a state variable can be used on the righthand side of an assignment and as part of a conditional expression. If the variable is a reference to an object, then calling a method through the instance context provided by the variable is also an example of a use.…”

“…In his dissertation, Alexander classified a number of basic syntactic patterns that can be used to extend a class through inheritance [1]. The use of individual or combinations of these patterns in part determines the semantics of a descendant class and its behavioral compatibility with its ancestor.…”