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How Exception Handling Constructions are Tested: An Initial Investigation with Open Source Software

Authors:
Auri Marcelo Rizzo Vincennzi
Joao Carlos da Silva
Plinio de Sa Leitao-Junior
Jose Carlos Maldonado
Marcio Eduardo Delamaro
Marcos Lordello Chaim

Keywords: software engineering; testing criteria; structural test- ing; code coverage; testing tools

Abstract:
Software testing is one of the most important activities in software development to deliver quality to the final product. Aiming at high efficacy, high quality and a low-cost testing strategy, several testing techniques and criteria have been proposed in the last decades. In particular, structural testing techniques are among the most popular. The authors have extended traditional structural testing in order to meet this requirement, allowing its application to a software with exception handling structures to assess the coverage measurement of such structures. In this paper, we present control- and data-flow criteria to exercise such structures and then evaluate four well-known open source software projects according to these criteria. The results show that test cases for those software achieved low coverage of exception handling code and normal execution code as well. The work also shows that using test criteria which discriminate between exceptional and normal testing requirements might be useful to produce a better degree of information about the test set evaluated.

Pages: 38 to 44

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: October 27, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-304-9

Location: Venice, Italy

Dates: from October 27, 2013 to October 31, 2013