Empirical Analysis for Investigating the Effect of Control Flow Dependencies on Testability

Abstract ─ We present, in this paper, a new metric capturing in an integrated way different attributes of object-oriented systems. The metric uses basically control flow paths and probabilities. It captures the interactions between classes and related control. The study presented in this paper aims at exploring empirically the relationship between the proposed metric and testability of classes. We investigate testability from the perspective of unit testing. We designed and conducted an empirical study using data collected from two open source Java software systems for which JUnit test cases exist. To capture testability of classes, we used different metrics to quantify the corresponding JUnit test cases. In order to evaluate the capability of the new metric to predict testability of classes, we used statistical tests using correlation. The achieved results provide evidence that there exist a significant relationship between the proposed metric and testability of classes