Use of aspects for testing software applications

Software testing is a process which is used to examine the correctness and quality of a computer software. Software testing is important to point out the defects and errors that are made during software development and to ensure that the developed software works fine in the real environment with different operating systems, devices, browsers and concurrent users. Making reliable software applications is becoming increasingly important and thus software testing is indispensable. One of the main challenges in software testing is that there are many quality concerns that cut across different modules in the software and thus testing requires modifying the source code of various modules. In this paper, we propose the use of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) for the purpose of creeping inside the program´s modules without modifying their source code and test components where we suspect bugs. Aspects in AOP can capture one or more execution points in the program using pointcuts and further advices can be written to insert relevant code at such execution points for the purpose of testing. We examine the suitability of using aspects for writing testing codes and perform various types of software testing.