Investigating the Applicability of Traditional Test Adequacy Criteria for Object-oriented Programs

Research in software testing has identified and studied several criteria to measure the adequacy of a set of input data used to test software. Since the existing adequacy criteria were developed and demonstrated in a non-OO environment, it is important to examine whether those criteria can be equally effective for measuring the test adequacy of OO programs. This paper describes a case study performed to investigate the applicability of the traditional adequacy criteria for OO programs. The mutation method that provides an assessment of the test adequacy criteria by their fault detection capabilities was used to carry out the study.