ANU Computer Science Technical Reports
TR-CS-95-06
Oscar Bosman and Heinz W. Schmidt.
Object test coverage using finite state machines.
September 1995.
Submitted to TOOLS Pacific '95. Also available as TR95-15, Department of
Software Development, Monash University.
[POSTSCRIPT (102874 bytes)] [PDF (238542 bytes)]
Abstract: (abridged) Objects have state and
behaviour, but views of state differ. For a programmer, it is the current
values of the attributes. In most OO design methods, an object's state is an
abstraction of this: design states are determined by the observable behaviour
of the object. The difference is significant, the two views behave
differently under inheritance, and this can make it difficult to validate an
implementation against its specification. We describe a technique for
resolving these different views of state. The representation states of an
object can be partitioned into abstract states by predicates on the
attributes. Then the behaviour of objects can be described by finite state
machines. Since there are testing techniques based on proving the equivalence
of FSMs (e.g., a specification and its implementation), it is feasible to
prove test coverage of generated tests for object oriented programs to the
level of abstract states.
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Last modified: Tue May 31 12:55:59 EST 2011