Developing A Testing Strategy For Pattern-oriented Software.

Software Design Patterns have been used to develop complex software systems, which are easy to maintain and reuse for over a decade now. Despite their widespread use in software design and development, the testing of pattern-oriented software has been largely neglected. Software testing is an integral part of the software development process and this is also very true for pattern-oriented software. To ensure that the software community gets maximum benefits from the use of design patterns in their projects an equally elaborate mechanism, set of guidelines and strategy for testing such software developed using the patterns must also be put in place. However, for now, there is very little research that has been conducted in the field of pattern-oriented software testing. This is thesis is intended to be a modest and humble contribution towards alleviating this acute lack of research in an otherwise very important aspect of pattern-oriented software development. I intend to consider issues that are pertinent to the testing of pattern-oriented software for each of the design patterns as described by the Gang of Four in their famous book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-oriented software. In the context of this thesis, pattern-oriented software refers to any software unit that has been developed by implementing one or more of the software design patterns described by the Gang of Four.