Data Flow Integration Testing Criteria for Aspect-Oriented Programs

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a new technique proposed for improving separation of concerns in software development. Although it is claimed that AOP increases understandability and eases the maintenance burden, the technology cannot provide correctness by itself, and thus it also requires systematic verification, validation and testing (VV&T) approaches to improve software quality. One of the problems that can arise while using the AOP technology are the emergent data dependencies created by the integration of the primary abstractions – that implement the core functions – and aspects. Thus, an approach to exercise data flow interactions among primary abstractions and aspect enhancements is interesting for detecting faults related to these dependencies. For that purpose, a model for representing control and data flow of the integrated modules – along with four data flow testing criteria – is proposed based on the woven artifacts generated for programs implemented with AspectJ 1.2, an aspect-oriented extension of Java.