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 associations in libraries written in object-oriented languages (e.g., C++ and Java) is di#cult because of unknown aliasing between parameters, unknown concrete types of the parameters, dynamic dispatch and exceptions. We present the first algorithm for finding def-uses in object-oriented libraries that overcomes the above di#culties. We also show how the information computed by our algorithm can be used in generating relevant test cases. 1 Introduction Data-flow-based testing [RW85, FW88, OW88, LCS89, Ost90, OW91, HR94] is based on the intuition that until the result of a computation has been used during testing, a program has not been tested with respect to this computation. Many useful data-flow testing criteria can be defined using def-use relationship..