An Integration Test Order Strategy to Consider Control Coupling
This work addresses integration testing in software engineering, offering an incremental improvement by incorporating control coupling to optimize test order strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of generating class integration test orders by considering control coupling, an indirect interclass dependency previously omitted, and shows that this approach significantly reduces stubbing cost for most programs and achieves results more quickly than other methods.
Integration testing is a very important step in software testing. Existing methods evaluate the stubbing cost for class integration test orders by considering only the interclass direct relationships such as inheritance, aggregation, and association, but they omit the interclass indirect relationship caused by control coupling, which can also affect the test orders and the stubbing cost. In this paper, we introduce an integration test order strategy to consider control coupling. We advance the concept of transitive relationship to describe this kind of interclass dependency and propose a new measurement method to estimate the complexity of control coupling, which is the complexity of stubs created for a transitive relationship. We evaluate our integration test order strategy on 10 programs on various scales. The results show that considering the transitive relationship when generating class integration test orders can significantly reduce the stubbing cost for most programs and that our integration test order strategy obtains satisfactory results more quickly than other methods.