Software testing of the behavioral aspects of objects

Abstract

Considerable work has previously been done on testing the static aspects of object-oriented systems. This includes both unit testing of individual objects as well as integration testing, which tests whether the static relationships between objects (such as inheritance and aggregation) have been properly implemented. Little work has been done on testing the dynamic aspects beyond testing individual methods. Important issues such as message sequencing, the execution order of methods and inter-object dynamics have not been adequately addressed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a method of software testing the dynamics of these object-oriented systems.