An Empirical Evaluation of Data Flow Testing of Java Classes

This paper tackles the problem of structural integration testing of stateful classes. Previous work on structural testing of objectoriented software exploits data flow analysis to derive test requirements for class testing and defines contextual def-use associations to characterize inter-method relations. Non-contextual data flow testing of classes works well for unit testing, but not for integration testing, since it misses definitions and uses when properly encapsulated. Contextual data flow analysis approaches investigated so far either do not focus on state dependent behavior, or have limited applicability due to high complexity. This paper proposes an efficient structural technique based on contextual data flow analysis to test state-dependent behavior of classes that aggregate other classes as part of their state.