Automation of object-oriented framework application testing

Automation is a vital issue in software testing. Typically, many test cases have to be built and evaluated, which makes manual testing impractical for medium to large sized software systems. Object-oriented frameworks provide reusable design, implementation, and testing for a family of software systems. The classes that directly use or inherit the framework classes are called Framework Interface Classes (FICs). This paper addresses the automation issues related to the generation and use of the FIC reusable test cases. For this purpose, a tool called Framework Interface State Transition Tester (FIST2) is introduced and its prototype is developed. The tool generates reusable test cases for Java framework FICs at the framework development stage. The tool also deploys, executes, and evaluates the test cases at the application development stage.