Testing Aspect Oriented Programs: an Approach Based on the Coverage of the Interactions among Advices and Methods

Testing is a fundamental issue to ensure software quality. Testing aspect oriented programs may be more difficult than traditional ones, due to the large impact that aspects have on the static structure and dynamic behavior of the overall system. Aspects may be sources for failures due to new kinds of faults in their code, by affecting the overall quality of the system. New testing approaches and criteria, taking into account the aspect-oriented constructs, are needed to capture the new kind of program failures. In this paper we propose a set of testing coverage criteria based on the interactions among the advices and the methods they affect. The proposed criteria are based on the inter-procedural aspect control flow graph (IACFG) representing the inter-procedural interactions among advices and methods.