Visualizing Dynamic Objects in Object-oriented Program

摘要

Object-oriented program's behavior is difficult to comprehend and test due to the present of inheritance and dynamic binding. Inheritance objects create global accessible objects thru their public method and public data member. Dynamic binding mechanism creates dynamic binding objects through the polymorphism. Static analysis methodologies yield too large set of dependencies for these objects. Consequently, it is difficult for the tester to identify precisely the change impact, especially in regression testing. We propose a tool call Object History Graph (OHG) to capture and display this dynamic object behavior, including changes of history and interactions with other objects in the system. The tool allows the user to include or exclude specific objects. Therefore, the tool facilitates the process of tracking down the global accessible object dependencies as well as dynamic binding object dependencies.