A Coupling-Based Approach for Class Integration and Test Order

Software testing is one of the most important techniques used to assure the quality of software service. An intricate issue in software testing is the determination of test orders for the integration test of classes, known as the class integration and test order (CITO) problem. The determination of such order has an influence on the cost of created stubs for classes, which is an error-prone and costly process. To minimize the cost of stubbing, this paper describes a coupling measure technique to estimate the complexity of each test stub, and presents a graph-based heuristic algorithm of removing node with the highest weights to break cycles for minimizing overall complexity of stubbing. Also, an adjacency matrix and depth-first search for finding all the paths is presented. Simulation experimental results show that the overall test stub complexity decreased which greatly improves test efficiency and reduces the test cost to some extent compared with others.