2010. Dsc+Mock: A test case + mock class generator in support of coding against interfaces

Coding against interfaces is a powerful technique in object-oriented programming. It decouples code and enables in-dependent development. However, code decoupled via in-terfaces poses additional challenges for testing and dynamic execution, as not all pieces of code that are necessary to ex-ecute a piece of code may be available. For example, a client class may be coded against several interfaces. For testing, however, no classes may be available that implement the in-terfaces. This means that, to support testing, we need to generate mock classes along with test cases. Current test case generators do not fully support this kind of indepen-dent development and testing. In this paper, we describe a novel technique for gener-ating test cases and mock classes for object-oriented pro-grams that are coded against interfaces. We report on our initial experience with an implementation of our technique for Java. Our prototype implementation achieved higher code coverage than related tools that do not generate mock classes, such as Pex