An Integration Test Order Strategy to Consider Control Coupling.
Abstract
Integration testing is a very important step in software testing. Existing methods evaluate the stubbing cost for class integration test orders by considering only the interclass direct relationships such as inheritance, aggregation, and association, but they omit the interclass indirect relationship caused by control coupling, which can also affect the test orders and the stubbing cost. In this paper, we introduce an integration test order strategy to consider control coupling. We advance the concept of transitive relationship to describe this kind of interclass dependency and propose a new measurement method to estimate the complexity of control coupling, which is the complexity of stubs created for a transitive relationship. We evaluate our integration test order strategy on 10 programs on various scales. The results show that considering the transitive relationship when generating class integration test orders can significantly reduce the stubbing cost for most programs and that our integration test order strategy obtains satisfactory results more quickly than other methods. Index Terms-control coupling, integration test order, software testing, stubbing cost ---------- ---------- publications have proposed various approaches and strate1 INTRODUCTION gies for the CITO problems and the evaluation metrics for common problem in the interclass integration testing of the results obtained with their methods. object-oriented software is to determine the order in The stubbing cost is used to measure various CITOs. which the classes are integrated and tested [1]. Theoretically, Studies have assessed the stubbing cost from several aspects. Kung et al. [1] first used the number of stubs to evaluate the the function used by the first class to be tested must be mimperformance of approaches. Fewer stubs were needed, and icked by creating "stubs" (or mock objects). Suppose that a the method's performance was better. This metric was once system has 32 classes and that 8 of those classes have been popular among researchers, but later studies found that the integrated. Among the remaining 24, suppose that class A class test order with the fewest stubs may not be the best