Criteria for Testing Exception-Handling Constructs in Java Programs

Exception-handling constructs provide a mechanism for raising exceptions, and a facility for designating protected code by attaching exception handlers to blocks of code. Despite the frequency of their occurrences, the behavior of exception-handling constructs is often the least understood and poorly tested part of a program. The presence of such constructs introduces new structural elements, such as control-flow paths, in a program. To adequately test such programs, these new structural elements must be considered for coverage during structural testing. In this paper, we describe a class of adequacy criteria that can be used to test the behavior of exception-handling constructs. We present a subsumption hierarchy of the criteria, and illustrate the relationship of the criteria to those found in traditional subsumption hierarchies. We describe techniques for generating the test requirements for the criteria using our control-flow representations. We also describe a methodology for app...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Saurabh Sinha, Mary Jean Harrold
• Keywords: Adequacy Criteria, Exception Handlers, Exception-handling Constructs, ICSM 1999, Software Engineering