A Case Study Using the Round-Trip Strategy for State-Based Class Testing

A number of strategies have been proposed for state-based class testing. An important proposal was made by Chow [5] and adapted by Binder [3]: It consists in deriving test sequences covering all round-trip paths in a finite state machine (FSMs). Based on a number of (rather strong) assumptions, and for traditional FSMs, it can be demonstrated that all operation and transfer errors in the implementation can be uncovered. Through experimentation, this paper investigates this strategy when used in the context of UML statecharts. Based on a set of mutation operators proposed for object-oriented code we seed a significant number of faults in an implementation of a specific container class. We then investigate the effectiveness of four test teams at uncovering faults, based on the round-trip path strategy, and analyze the faults that seem to be difficult to detect. Our main conclusion is that the round-trip path strategy is reasonably effective at detecting faults (87% average as opposed to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: ISSRE
• Authors: Giuliano Antoniol, Lionel C. Briand, Massimiliano Di Penta, Yvan Labiche
• Keywords: Class Testing, ISSRE 2002, Round-trip Path, Round-trip Path Strategy, Software Engineering