Test Sequence Generation For Integration Testing Of Component Software

Ensuring high object interoperability is a goal of integration testing for object-oriented (OO) software. When messages are sent, objects that receive them should respond as intended. Ensuring this is especially difficult when software uses components that are developed by different vendors, in different languages, and the implementation sources are not all available. A finite state machines model of inter-operating OO classes was presented in a previous paper. The previous paper presented details of the method and empirical results from an automatic tool. This paper presents additional details about the tool itself, including how test sequences are generated, how several difficult problems were solved and the introduction of new capabilities to help automate the transformation of test specifications into executable test cases. Although the test method is not 100% automated, it represents a fresh approach to automated testing. It follows accepted theoretical procedures while operating directly on OO software specifications. This yields a data flow graph and executable test cases that adequately cover the graph according to classical graph coverage criteria. The tool supports specification-based testing and helps to bridge the gap between theory and practice.