A State-Based Approach to Testing Aspect-Oriented Programs

This paper presents a state-based approach to testing aspect-oriented programs. Aspectual state models, as an extension to the testable FREE state model of classes, are exploited to capture the impact of aspects on the state models of classes. To generate test suites for adequately testing object behavior and interaction between classes and aspects in terms of message sequences, we transform an aspectual state model to a transition tree, where each path from the root to some leaf node indicates a template of test cases, i.e. message sequences. Since the statebased approach is directly built upon the test design patterns for object-oriented programs, it is not only applicable to the simultaneous development of classes and aspects, but also to the incremental development of aspects based on the existing classes. Keywords: Aspect-oriented programming, software testing, state model, transition tre