A Tool to Automatically Map Implementation-Based Testing Techniques to Classes

Abstract

The object-oriented (OO) paradigm provides several benefits during analysis and design of large-scale software systems, but scores lower in terms of testability. The low testability score for OO software is due mainly to the composition of OO systems exhibiting the characteristics of abstraction, encapsulation, genericity, inheritance, polymorphism, concurrency and exception handling. To address the difficulty of testing the features of a class, a plethora of implementation-based testing techniques (IBTTs) have been developed. However, no one IBTT has emerged as the preferred technique to test the implementation of a class. In this paper we present a technique that automatically identify those IBTTs that are most suitable for testing a class based on the characteristics of that class. Our approach uses a taxonomy of OO classes that is used to succinctly abstract the characteristics of a class under test (CUT). We have implemented a tool that automates the process of mapping IBTTs to a class. In addition to identifying the IBTTs that would be best suited for testing a class, our tool provides feedback to the tester facilitating the identification of the characteristics of the class that are not suitably tested by any of the IBTTs in the list. We provide results of a study supporting the notion that using more than on IBTT during testing improves test coverage of a CUT.

A tool chain for reverse engineering C++ applications

“…The preferred point of access is at the end of the chain where an Application Programmers Interface (API) provides easy access to information about the names, classes, namespaces, functions, function calls or statements in the C ++ application under study. Our tool has been used to build class diagrams, object relation diagrams (ORDs), a taxonomy of classes for maintenance, to facilitate software visualization and to compute metrics to evaluate object-oriented applications [9,25,20,28,32].…”

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

“…An initial version of our taxonomy of OO classes is presented in reference [10]. The version presented in this paper has been revised as follows: (1) extending the number of descriptors in the Nomenclature, Attributes, and Routines components to more accurately summarize the characteristics of the class, (2) using add-on descriptors to catalog classes written in virtually any OO language, (3) renaming the type families (class associated types) to be more meaningful, and (4) extending the type families to include parameterized types.…”

“…The version presented in this paper has been revised as follows: (1) extending the number of descriptors in the Nomenclature, Attributes, and Routines components to more accurately summarize the characteristics of the class, (2) using add-on descriptors to catalog classes written in virtually any OO language, (3) renaming the type families (class associated types) to be more meaningful, and (4) extending the type families to include parameterized types. The mapping process in reference [10] is based solely on the Nomenclature component entry. We have extended the mapping process to include the entries in the Attributes and Routines components.…”

Automated recovery, maintenance and testing of input validation

“…Various testing strategies have been proposed in the literature [3,28,40,43,48,92,125,130,183]. These testing strategies can be broadly classified into black-box testing and white-box testing [85].…”