A study of Object Oriented testing techniques: Survey and challenges

Object-orientation has rapidly become accepted as the preferred paradigm for large-scale system design. The product created during Software Development effort has to be tested since bugs may get introduced during its development. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the various software testing methodologies available to test object-oriented software. Software based on Object Oriented technology poses challenges to conventional testing techniques since it involves concepts like Inheritance, Polymorphism etc., It is very essential to monitor the behavior of every object during its lifetime by keeping track of where the object is defined and where such definition is referenced. In this paper we have discussed about how Unit testing, Integration Testing and System Testing are being carried out in the Object Oriented environment. To accommodate these strategies, several new techniques have been proposed like Fault-based Testing, Scenario-based Testing, Surface Structure testing and a brief discussion of these techniques has also been presented.