A test framework for integration testing of object-oriented programs

A lot of research has been done in the field of testing object-oriented programs. However, integration testing forms only a small part of this work and few tools are available to implement the integration testing approaches. This paper presents a new integration testing approach for object-oriented programs and a prototype tool supporting the testing approach. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed technique generates test cases using the concept of Coordination Contract, a specification mechanism which superposes behavior on components without interfering with their implementations. It is related to the concept of active association in UML. One of the advantages in using contracts is that there is a well-developed Coordination Development Environment (CDE) which can transform contracts into Java classes that can be compiled with the components to form a test framework. We describe a tool to automatically generate the contracts from UML sequence diagrams and class diagrams and to accomplish the automation of test execution by using CDE.