Improving evolutionary class testing in the presence of non-public methods

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Improving evolutionary class testing in the presence of non-public methods

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Automated Software Engineering archive
Proceedings of the twenty-second IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering table of contents

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

POSTER SESSION: Posters table of contents

Pages 381-384

Year of Publication: 2007

ISBN:978-1-59593-882-4

Authors

Stefan Wappler	Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, UNK, Germany
Ina Schieferdecker	Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, UNK, Germany

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGACT: ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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ABSTRACT

Automating the generation of object-oriented unit tests is a challenging task. This is mainly due to the complexity and peculiarities that the principles of object-orientation imply. One of these principles is the encapsulation of class members which prevents non-public methods and attributes of the class under test from being freely accessed.

This paper suggests an improvement of our automated search-based test generation approach which particularly addresses the test of non-public methods. We extend our objective functions by an additional component that accounts for encapsulation. Additionally, we propose a modification of the search space which increases the efficiency of the approach. The value of the improvement in terms of achieved code coverage is demonstrated by a case study with 7 real-world test objects. In contrast to other approaches which break encapsulation in order to test non-public methods, the tests generated by our approach inherently guarantee that class invariants are not violated. At the same time, refactorings of the encapsulated class members will not break the generated tests

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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