Or Regression Testing of Object-Oriented Programs

Regression testing is an important activity in software maintenance. Although a number of studies have addressed the problems and solutions in regression testing of traditional programs, no studies have focused on the issues and solutions in regression testing of object-oriented programs. In this article, we discuss various types of code changes of classes in an object-oriented program and present a method for identifying these changes and the affected classes. An algorithm for generating a desirable order to test the affected classes is also described. The basic model we use is an object relation graph, which depicts the inheritance, aggregation, and association relations that exist in the object-oriented program to be maintained. The test order generation algorithm can be applied to acyclic as well as cyclic object relation graphs. The results of this work have been implemented and applied to testing of many example applications, including the Interviews library.