Empirical Studies of Object-Oriented Artifacts, Methods, and Processes: State of The Art and Future Directions

This paper summarizes the results of a working group at the Empirical Studies of Softwar

Testing levels for object-oriented software

One of the characteristics of object-oriented software is the complex dependency that may exist between classes due to inheritance, association and aggregation relationships. Hence, where to start testing and how to define an integration strategy are issues that require further investigation. This paper presents an approach to define a test order by exploiting a model produced during design stages (e.g., using OMT, UML), namely the class diagram. Our goal is to minimize the number of stubs to be cons

Failure Risk Estimation via Markov Software Usage Models

A software usage models describes the prospective use of a program in its intended environment and allows the generation of random test cases leading to unbiased estimates of the failure risk, i.e., the expected loss by program failure. We concentrate on usage models of Markov type and show that by suitable changes of the probabilities of state transitions during test, the precision of the risk estimate can be optimized. An algorithm for the computation of optimal transition probabilities is presented, and experimental results based on a C++ implementation of this algorithm are reported. 1 Introduction Recently, software usage models of Markov type have found considerable interest (see [10, 11, 12, 9]). The purpose of a software usage model is to give a formal description of the expected operational use of a software system, i.e., its use in its intended application environment. Such a model is an essential prerequisite for statistical testing, a special variant of random testing all..