TY - GEN
T1 - Investigating the use of analysis contracts to support fault isolation in object oriented code
AU - Briand, L. C.
AU - Labiche, Y.
AU - Sun, H.
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - A number of activities involved in testing software are known to be difficult and time consuming. Among them is the isolation of faults once failures have been detected. In this paper, we investigate how the instrumentation of contracts could address this issue. Contracts are known to be a useful technique to specify the precondition and postcondition of operations and class invariants, thus making the definition of object-oriented analysis or design elements more precise. Our aim in this paper is to reuse and instrument contracts to ease testing. A thorough case study is run where we define contracts, instrument them using a commercial tool, and assess the benefits and limitations of doing so to support the isolation of faults. We then draw practical conclusions regarding the applicability of the approach and its limitations.
AB - A number of activities involved in testing software are known to be difficult and time consuming. Among them is the isolation of faults once failures have been detected. In this paper, we investigate how the instrumentation of contracts could address this issue. Contracts are known to be a useful technique to specify the precondition and postcondition of operations and class invariants, thus making the definition of object-oriented analysis or design elements more precise. Our aim in this paper is to reuse and instrument contracts to ease testing. A thorough case study is run where we define contracts, instrument them using a commercial tool, and assess the benefits and limitations of doing so to support the isolation of faults. We then draw practical conclusions regarding the applicability of the approach and its limitations.
KW - Contracts
KW - Object-Oriented Analysis
KW - Object-Oriented Testing
KW - Testability
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0036980168&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/566172.566183
DO - 10.1145/566172.566183
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:0036980168
SN - 1581135629
SN - 9781581135626
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 2002 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
SP - 70
EP - 80
BT - Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 2002 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
A2 - Frankl, P.G.
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - ISSTA 02 Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 2002 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
Y2 - 22 July 2002 through 24 July 2002
ER -