A Taxonomy of OO Classes to Support the Mapping of Testing Techniques to a Class.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a taxonomy of object-oriented classes that catalogs each class in an application according to the characteristics of that class, including the properties of the data attributes and routines as well as the relationships with other classes. Our taxonomy is motivated by the fact that the current research literature contains no formal methodology for capturing the characteristics of a class. To illustrate the advantages of the taxonomy, we apply it to the problem of choosing implementation-based testing techniques and, more importantly, we show that our taxonomy can expose characteristics of a class that remain uncovered by the chosen testing technique.

Analyzing characteristics of Java classes as related to implementation-based testing

“…[ Clarke and Malloy 2005] The properties of the features in a class are described in references [Arnold et al 2000;Meyer 1997;Sebesta 2004;Stroustrup 2004].…”

“…IIBTTs for testing classes, in this case, classes written in Java [Edelstein et al 2002;Sinha and Harrold 1999;Souter and Polock 2000;Fu et al 2004 an 00 application to be classified based on the characteristics they possesses Clarke and Malloy 2005;]. The taxonomy of 00 classes identifies these characteristics based on the dependencies the class has with other types (built-in and user-defined).…”

“…This information can be used to map IBTTs tot the members of Java classes [Clarke and Malloy 2005]. It may also be possible to use the classification generated by the taxonomy for a given class to show how testable a class is, or to indicate if it is defect-prone.…”

“…Subsequently, there have been numerous software testing techniques developed for testing classes in an 00 application [Clarke and Malloy 2005]. These are typically divided into two categories specification-based and implementation-based, with the latter focusing on the internal structure of the code and the adequacy of code coverage.…”

“…This technique is based on the CAT designed by Clarke et al, which was designed primarily for the C++ programming language, but has the ability to handle virtually any 00 language [Clarke and Malloy 2005;]. This was accomplished by defining a set of core descriptors for the characteristics common to most 00 languages, while a set of add-on descriptors would need to be identified for the specific language to catalog.…”