Conformance Testing of Object-Oriented Components Specified by State/Transition211 Classes

摘要

In object-oriented software development, a class is the basic unit of semantic211u001eabstraction, a component is a closely related collection of classes, and a system 211u001eis a collection of components designed to solve a problem. An object is an 211u001einstance of a class. Each object consists of state and behavior, where state is 211u001edetermined by the values of state variables identified in the class definition, 211u001eand behavior is determined by methods (i.e. functions or procedures), defined in 211u001ethe class, that operate on one or more object instances to read or modify their 211u001estate variables. Objects communicate by sending messages to one another, where a 211u001emessage is a request to invoke one of the recipient object's methods. Conformance 211u001etesting of object-oriented software is often done in three stages: unit testing, 211u001eto ensure that the individual methods of a class are properly defined over all 211u001epossible object instances; component testing, to ensure that methods restricted 211u001eto the component under test operate as specified by rules of how the component 211u001eshould behave and that messages to external objects are properly sent; and system 211u001etesting, to ensure that the entire system behaves as specified by some overall 211u001esystem functional specification. Both component testing and system testing rely 211u001eheavily on integration testing, which ensures that messages from objects in one 211u001eclass or component are sent and received in the proper order and have the 211u001eintended effect on the state of external objects that receive the messages. This 211u001enew work focuses on integration testing.