AOP approach for testing program invariants

Abstract

Mankind is becoming increasingly dependent on software technology which intensifies the need for thorough software testing and development of automated software testing techniques. We have proposed Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) as a potential methodology for performing various types of automated software testing. In this paper, we have particularly demonstrated the use of AOP for performing testing of invariants in software artifacts. Invariants are assertions about the state of a program that are expected to be true each time control reaches a particular point in the program. If an assertion is found not to be true, then such condition corresponds to a bug discovery. In this paper, adherence to run time as well as compile time invariants in Java applications has been tested using AspectJ, which has become the de-facto standard for AOP. We established that our AOP approach for testing invariants has got several advantages like faster test execution, no test-code scattering etc.