ACADEMIC REPORT: OBJECT-ORIENTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING

Executive Summary The purpose of this report is to identify and describe the testing strategies, software tactics, testing techniques and metrics for Object Oriented (OO) software development context. The Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language refers to a programming methodology that is based on objects, instead of just functions and procedures. The OOP allows individual objects to organize and group themselves together into classes. The report explores the differences between the traditional development and the OO development context as well as the appropriate testing strategies, tactics, techniques and metrics for OO systems. The findings revealed that because of the complex structure of the OO development systems, therefore the traditional unit testing approach is ineffective when considering an OO system. Further, the three most used testing strategies are: the class testing strategy which starts immediately once the source code is being created; the two integration testing methods including the thread-based testing and the used-based testing; the cluster testing and the object state test model. Moreover, in the OO development, a variety of software development tactics and techniques can be used appropriately in different areas to help detect coding errors including: the black box, the use case modelling techniques, the object behaviour models and event flow diagrams. The white-box testing method can be applied to the operations defined for a class. Testers can also use the basis path, loop testing, or data flow techniques to check to ensure that every statement in an operation has been tested. Finally, many OO metrics have been proposed to assess the testability of an OO system.