Data-flow-based testing of object-oriented libraries

Data-flow-based testing is a well-established approach to program testing. Much object-oriented code is written as libraries; hence data-flow-based testing of object-oriented libraries is of great importance. However, finding def-use relationships in libraries written in object-oriented languages (e.g., Java and C++) is difficult because of unknown aliasing between parameters, unknown concrete types of the parameters, dynamic dispatch, and exceptions. We present the first algorithm for finding def-use relationships in object-oriented libraries that overcomes the above difficulties. We also show how the information computed by our algorithm can be used in generating relevant test cases. Our algorithm is flow- and context-sensitive and based on our earlier points-to analysis [CRL99]Technical report DCS-TR-43