Purpose of Object Oriented Testing
- Object Interaction Validation: Check to make sure objects interact with one another appropriately in various situations. Testing makes ensuring that the interactions between objects in object-oriented systems result in the desired results.
- Determining Design Errors: Find the object-oriented design’s limitations and design faults. Testing ensures that the design complies with the desired architecture by assisting in the identification of problems with inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation and other OOP concepts.
- Finding Integration Problems: Evaluate an object’s ability to integrate and communicate with other objects when it is part of a bigger component or subsystem. This helps in locating integration difficulties, such improper method calls or issues with data exchange.
- Assessment of Reusable Code: Evaluate object-oriented code’s reusability. Code reuse is promoted by object-oriented programming via features like inheritance and composition. Testing ensures that reusable parts perform as intended in various scenarios.
- Verification of Handling Exceptions: Confirm that objects respond correctly to error circumstances and exceptions. The purpose of object-oriented testing is to make sure that the software responds carefully and is durable in the face of unforeseen occurrences or faults.
- Verification of Uniformity: Maintain uniformity inside and between objects and the object-oriented system as a whole. Maintainability and readability are enhanced by consistency in naming standards, coding styles and compliance to design patterns.
Object Oriented Testing in Software Testing
Prerequisite – Software Testing
Software typically undergoes many levels of testing, from unit testing to system or acceptance testing. Typically, in-unit testing, small “units”, or modules of the software, are tested separately with a focus on testing the code of that module. In higher-order testing (e.g, acceptance testing), the entire system (or a subsystem) is tested with a focus on testing the functionality or external behavior of the system.
As information systems are becoming more complex, the object-oriented paradigm is gaining popularity because of its benefits in analysis, design, and coding. Conventional testing methods cannot be applied for testing classes because of problems involved in testing classes, abstract classes, inheritance, dynamic binding, message passing, polymorphism, concurrency, etc.
Testing classes is a fundamentally different issue than testing functions. A function (or a procedure) has a clearly defined input-output behavior, while a class does not have an input-output behavior specification. We can test a method of a class using approaches for testing functions, but we cannot test the class using these
approaches.
- Data dependencies between variables
- Calling dependencies between modules
- Functional dependencies between a module and the variable it computes
- Definitional dependencies between a variable and its types.
But in Object-Oriented systems, there are the following additional dependencies:
- Class-to-class dependencies
- Class to method dependencies
- Class to message dependencies
- Class to variable dependencies
- Method to variable dependencies
- Method to message dependencies
- Method to method dependencies