Mutation-based inter-class testing

Faults and failures due to interaction are the bane of testers. Since their subtlety makes them difficult to recognize and even more difficult to reveal by testing, it is important to specify interaction between classes systematically. In this paper, we propose mutation-based inter-class testing technique. Our inter-class testing technique consists of two procedures: test item identification procedure and test case selection procedure. For the test item identification procedure, we develop the Inheritance-Call graph (ICgraph) to identify the taxonomy of interaction of public methods between classes. For the test case selection procedure, we design a new criterion, state-based mutation testing criterion (SMTC), by applying mutation analysis to the state diagram representing class behavior. Mutation analysis is a well-known method for measuring test case adequacy which involves the mutation of a program by the introduction of small syntactic change in the program. The implementation of our proposed technique on a sample program shows that our technique leads to a set of test cases which detect errors in inter-class relation.