Programmatic Testing of the Standard Template Library Containers

In 1968, McIlroy proposed a software industry based on reusable components, serving roughly the same role that chips do in the hardware industry. After 30 years, McIlroy's vision is becoming a reality. In particular, the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) is an ANSI standard and is being shipped with C++ compilers. While considerable attention has been given to techniques for developing components, little is known about testing these components. This paper describes an STL conformance test suite currently under development. Test suites for all of the STL containers have been written, demonstrating the feasibility of thorough and highly automated testing of industrial component libraries. We describe affordable test suites that provide good code and boundary value coverage, including the thousands of cases that naturally occur from combinations of boundary values. We show how two simple oracles can provide fully automated output checking for all the containers. We refine the traditiona..