Developing an object-oriented software testing and maintenance environment

ABSTRACT

The object-oriented (OO) paradigm is rapidly gaining acceptance in the software industry. However, the powerful features of this new paradigm also introduce a new set of OO software testing and maintenance problems. The pioneering work in identifying these new problems includes [7, 10-12, 14, 16, 18]. The problems can be summarized as: 1) the understanding problem; 2) the complex interdependency problem; 3) the object state behavior testing problem; and 4) the tool support problem. Detailed discussions of these problems will be provided later. Our industrial experience confirms these discoveries.

REFERENCES

• 1: Boris Beizer, Software testing techniques (2nd ed.), Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, NY, 1990
• 2: Robert V. Binder, Object-oriented software testing, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.9, p.28-29, Sept. 1994 [doi>10.1145/182987.182988]
• 3: Roong-Ko Doong , Phyllis G. Frankl, The ASTOOT approach to testing object-oriented programs, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.3 n.2, p.101-130, April 1994 [doi>10.1145/192218.192221]
• 4: Mohamed Ebrahim Fayad, Object-oriented software engineering: problems and perspectives, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 1994
• 5: Daniel Hoffman , Xianhong Fang, Testing the C set++ collection class library, Proceedings of the 1994 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, p.26, October 31-November 03, 1994, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• 6: David Harel, On visual formalisms, Communications of the ACM, v.31 n.5, p.514-530, May 1988 [doi>10.1145/42411.42414]
• 7: Mary Jean Harrold , John D. McGregor , Kevin J. Fitzpatrick, Incremental testing of object-oriented class structures, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering, p.68-80, May 11-15, 1992, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/143062.143093]
• 8: Paul C. Jorgensen , Carl Erickson, Object-oriented integration testing, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.9, p.30-38, Sept. 1994 [doi>10.1145/182987.182989]
• 9: Kirani, S. and Tsai, W.T. Method sequence specification and verification of classes. J. Object-Oriented Programming (Oct. 1994), 28-38.
• 10: Kung, D., Gao, J., Hsia, P., Lin0, J., and Toyoshima, Y. Design recovery for software testing of object-oriented programs. In Proceedings of the Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (Baltimore, MD, May 21-23, 1993), pp. 202-211.
• 11: Kung, D., Suchak, N., Hsia, P., Toyoshima, Y., and Chen, C. On object state testing. In Proceedings of COMPSAC'94, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1994.
• 12: David Chenho Kung , Jerry Gao , Pei Hsia , F. Wen , Yasufumi Toyoshima , Cris Chen, Change Impact Identification in Object Oriented Software Maintenance, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.202-211, September 01, 1994
• 13: Kung, D., Gao, J., Hsia, P., Toyoshima, Y., and Chen, C. A test strategy for object-oriented systems. In Proceedings of Computer Software and Applications Conference (Dallas, Texas, August 9-11, 1995).
• 14: Moises Lejter , Scott Meyers , Steven P. Reiss, Support for Maintaining Object-Oriented Programs, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.18 n.12, p.1045-1052, December 1992 [doi>10.1109/32.184759]
• 15: D. E. Perry , G. E. Kaiser, Adequate testing and object-oriented programming, Journal of Object-Oriented Programming, v.2 n.5, p.13-19, Jan./Feb. 1990
• 16: Smith, M.D. and Robson, D.J. Object-oriented programming: The problems of validation. In Proceedings of the 1EEE Conference on Software Maintenance (1990), 272-281.
• 17: Christopher D. Turner , David J. Robson, The State-Based Testing of Object-Oriented Programs, Proceedings of the Conference on Software Maintenance, p.302-310, September 01, 1993
• 18: Norman Wilde , Ross Huitt, Maintenance Support for Object-Oriented Programs, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, v.18 n.12, p.1038-1044, December 1992 [doi>10.1109/TSE.1992.1263033]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Computer-aided software engineering (CASE)
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications

          Nouns: C++

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Languages