Data-flow-based Testing of Object-Oriented Libraries

Abstract

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 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-uses 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.