The Automatic Generation Of MM Paths Based On The Polymorphism Of Object-Oriented Software

New advanced features in object-oriented software development, such as encapsulation, inheritability and polymorphism, improve the reusability, extensibility and flexibility of object-oriented software, meanwhile, they bring new challenges to Object-Oriented Software Testing (OOST), especially object-oriented integration testing. MM path, Method/Message path, is a sequence of method executions linked by messages, which records the communication of different instances within system. Thus, MM path is the base of object-oriented integration testing.It is difficult in OOST to identify polymorphic call points of programs and to build call graph according to polymorphism of Object-Oriented software. As a result, generating MM path set based on polymorphism is a hard task. However, there is comparatively research on automatic generation of MM paths based on the polymorphism of object-oriented software. Therefore, it is very important and valuable to discuss how to automatically generate the MM paths according to the polymorphism of object-oriented software.After summarized the features of the polymorphism of object-oriented software and research work on generation of MM path, this thesis discusses the influence of polymorphism to the length, number and accuracy of a MM path, and the influence of points-to analysis and call graph construction in program static analysis. Then, the set of subclass's instances of a superclass reference is analysed by using the declare and define messages of the superclass reference, the polymorphic call points are recognized in the program, the call graph based on polymorphism is constructed and the MM paths are generated automatically. Many testing experiments are implemented in Java programs, and the experiment results shows that the automatic generation algorithm of MM paths based on the polymorphism of object-oriented software presented in this thesis is efficiently. This work makes a solid foundation for object-oriented integration testing research based on MM path.