A formal model of similarity testing for inheritance in object-oriented software

Abstract

The work presented in this paper extends the constraint model defined for modeling the specification of a given method to its redefinition in subclass using inheritance principle. The main objective is to establish theoretical concepts which allow to compare the behavior of a redefined method in a subclass with its original behavior in the super-class relatively to the basic specification. The key idea of our approach is based on a partition of domains for testing the similarity between the redefined methods and their basic methods in super-class. The proposed test oracle uses a random data generation to test the similarity of methods in the context of inheritance mechanism.