Nirmal Kumar Gupta

Using Genetic Algorithm for Unit Testing of Object Oriented Software

Genetic algorithms have been successfully applied in the area of software testing. The demand for automation of test case generation in object oriented software testing is increasing. Genetic algorithms are well applied in procedural software testing but a little has been done in testing of object oriented software. In this paper, we propose a method to generate test cases for classes in object oriented software using a genetic programming approach. This method uses tree representation of statements in test cases. Strategies for encoding the test cases and using the objective function to evolve them as suitable test case are proposed.

Class Level Test Case Generation in Object Oriented Software Testing

Object-oriented programming consists of several different levels of abstraction, namely, the algorithmic level, class level, cluster level, and system level. In this article, we discuss a testing technique to generate test cases at class level for object-oriented programs. The formal object oriented class specification is used to develop a test model. This test model is based on finite state machine specification. The class specification and the test model is analyzed to select a set of test data for each method of the class, and finally the test cases can be generated using other testing techniques like finite-state testing or data-flow testing.

Exploring Possibilities of Reducing Maintenance Effort in Object Oriented Software by Minimizing Indirect Coupling

The quality of a good object oriented software design is much effective when it has highly maintainable class components. This paper describes an investigation into the use of indirect coupling to provide early indications of maintenance effort in object oriented software. The properties of interest are: (i) the potential maintainability of a class and (ii) the likelihood that a class will be affected by maintenance changes made to the overall system. The research explores that minimizing indirect coupling can provide useful indications of software maintenance effort that may have a significant influence on the effort during system maintenance and testing.

Measuring Maintenance Effort in Object Oriented Software with Indirect Coupling

Measurement of maintenance effort in object oriented software engineering is one of the major challenges. Coupling among classes is one of the major factors determining the maintenance effort. Coupling is measured as strength of interconnection or interdependence between different parts of the Classes in object oriented software. It is widely accepted that there is strong relationship between high coupling and poor maintainability. Indirect coupling which is transitive in nature manifests between two seemingly unrelated parts of the system through hidden connections plays a major role in determining maintenance effort. This research proposes a set of metrics which determines maintenance effort for software with Indirect Coupling. General Terms Software Quality, Software Engineering, Object Oriented Tesing.