A technique for analysing and testing object-oriented software using coloured Petri nets

Object-oriented software essentially has dynamic aspect such as object creation, deletion and dynamic binding during execution. This aspect makes behavior analysis and tests of object-oriented software significantly complicated. In this paper we propose a new technique of object-oriented software analysis and testing by using Coloured Petri Nets (CPN), which is an extended version of Petri Net, one of formal techniques having the ability to analyze concurrent behavior. We represent identified objects with colored tokens of a CPN expressing object oriented software in order to avoid the net-explosion problem. We provide translation rules of object-oriented software into a CPN and a technique to analyze and test effectively the net to investigate several behavioral properties. Our translation technique is essentially independent of which language we describe software. As an example, to show the effectiveness of our technique, we pick up UML (Unified Modeling Language) and translate a specification written in it into a CPN. The net is analyzed tested and simulated as a prototype of the specification.