A dependence graph-based representation for test coverage analysis of object-oriented programs

Abstract

Test coverage analysis is used to determine the extent to which different features of interest are exercised by a given test suite. For object-oriented programs, it involves determining the extent to which features such as inheritance, polymorphism, dynamic binding, etc. are exercised. As object-oriented coverage analysis using only source code or object code is difficult and inefficient, the source code is converted to a suitable intermediate representation for subsequent analysis. We propose a dependence graph-based representation for object-oriented programs, named Call-based Object-Oriented System Dependence Graph (COSDG). COSDG captures the important object-oriented features, provides details of method visibility in a derived class, and differentiates various calling contexts with different type of method call edges: simple, inherited, and polymorphic. We also propose an algorithm to construct COSDG incrementally. Though COSDG has been developed primarily to aid test coverage analysis, it can be used in a variety of other software engineering applications also.