Hardware techniques for testing software components

Object-oriented software engineering concerns itself with system construction using standardized components in a manner analogous to the construction of hardware systems. These components are contained in class libraries. A number of class libraries have been developed and are commercially available. Class libraries should be well defined and documented, portable and carefully tested. However, there is no accepted practice for testing these libraries. In this paper, we draw on hardware testing experience and describe an effective scheme for testing class iterators using check-sums