An Integration Test Order Strategy to Consider Control Coupling

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new integration test order strategy that considers control coupling, including indirect relationships, to reduce stubbing costs and improve testing efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a transitive relationship concept and a new measurement method for control coupling complexity, enhancing test order strategies.

Findings

Considering transitive relationships reduces stubbing costs.

The strategy performs faster than existing methods.

Results are validated on 10 diverse programs.

Abstract

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.