Approach to constructing software unit testing tools

Software unit testing studies how to test a portion of a program, called a software unit, which may be a procedure, a function or a collection of procedures or functions. Automated test drivers have been used to control the execution of the unit under test. When using test drivers, software stubs need to be constructed to replace all procedures called by the unit under test as the unit has been isolated from its operational environment. However, the automatic construction of stubs have not yet been achieved, and manual production of stubs proves to be difficult and time-consuming. An approach is presented called the direct test access method, for constructing software unit testing tools which provide the same capabilities as the automated test drivers but avoids the overhead of constructing stubs