A method level based approach for OO integration testing: an experimental study

Objects interact in order to implement behavior. One important problem when integrating and testing object-oriented software is to reduce the number of required test stubs and to determine an effective class integration order. The strong connectivity between classes complicates this task. We present, in this paper, a new class integration testing strategy based on a new class dependency model (CDM). The CDM model takes into account the interactions between classes. In order to validate our approach and to compare it to some of the existing object-oriented integration strategies, we conducted an experimental study on several real-world Java programs. The obtained results show that the strategy we propose reduce considerably the number of required test stubs.