Testing Extensible Design Patterns in Object-Oriented Frameworks through Scenario Templates

Design patterns have been used in object-oriented frameworks such as the IBM San Francisco framework, Apple’s Rhaspody, OpenStep, and WebObjects, and DIWB. However, few guidelines are available on to effectively test the software developed with design patterns. This paper first discusses the issues in testing applications developed with design patterns using an object-oriented framework. Two kinds of design patterns are available, extensible and static patterns, and this paper focuses on testing applications using extensible design patterns. Applications developed using extensible design patterns are difficult to test due to dynamic typing, dynamic binding, extensibility, and communication complexity. This paper then presents a technique, Message Framework Sequence Specifications (MfSS), for generating scenario templates that can be used to generate test cases to test applications developed using extensible design patterns and an object-oriented framework. Various partition test cases and random test cases can be generated from a MfSS. Finally, this paper uses the MfSS technique to test a small bank framework. The test cases generated successfully detected numerous faults that were seeded in the program