A Dependence Representation for Coverage Testing of Object-Oriented Programs

We propose a dependence-based representation for object-oriented programs, named Call-based Object-Oriented System Dependence Graph (COSDG). Apart from structural features, COSDG captures important object-oriented features such as class, inheritance, and polymorphism. Novel features of COSDG include details of method visibility in a derived class, and different types of method call edges to distinguish between various calling contexts—simple, inherited, and polymorphic. We also propose an algorithm for the construction of COSDG, and subsequently explain its working with an example. COSDG has been developed primarily to aid test coverage analysis. However, it can be used in a variety of other software engineering applications such as program slicing, software re-engineering, and debugging.