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The Computer Journal Advance Access originally published online on August 7, 2007
The Computer Journal 2009 52(5):557-570; doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxm054
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following The Computer Journal issue: Special Issue on Automation of Software Test AST [View the issue table of contents]

Using Coupling-Based Weights for the Class Integration and Test Order Problem

Aynur Abdurazik* and Jeff Offutt

Information and Software Engineering, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

* Corresponding author: aabduraz{at}gmu.edu

Received 29 August 2006; revised 26 March 2007

During component-based and object-oriented software development, software classes exhibit relationships that complicate integration, including method calls, inheritance and aggregation. Classes are integrated and tested in specific orders, where each class is added and tested one by one to see if it integrates successfully. A difficulty arises when cyclic dependencies exist—the functionality that is used by the first class to be tested must be mimicked by creating ‘stubs’ (sometimes called ‘mock objects’), an expensive and error-prone operation. This problem is generally called the class integration and test order (CITO) problem, and solutions must fully be automated for integration and testing to proceed smoothly and efficiently. This paper describes new techniques and algorithms to solve the CITO problem. New results include improved edge weights to more precisely model the cost of stubbing, and the use of node weights, which allows more information to be used. These weights are derived from quantitative measures of couplings between the integrated and the stubbed classes. Also, a new algorithm for computing the integration and test orders is presented. The technique is compared with an existing approach and found to be cheaper, get the same results when using edge weights exclusively, and yield better results when using node weights.

Key Words: OO testing • class integration and test order • coupling


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