Testing for a conformance relation based on acceptance

Abstract

Although the object-oriented paradigm has been gaining wide popularity in recent years, little work has been done on how to test object-oriented software systems. We believe that many special programming features found in the object-oriented paradigm will also play important roles during the testing phase. In this paper, we propose a conformance testing method for object-oriented software systems. The conformance relation that can be tested by this method is based on a modified version of the acceptance tree model and takes into account the special requirements imposed by the inheritance mechanism -- which we believe is the most important feature provided by the object-oriented paradigm. The proposed method allows us to test, under certain assumptions, whether an object instance implementation conforms to a given class specification by applying to the implementation the test cases derived from the given class specification.