Testing criteria for object oriented visual dataflow languages

Issue title: Selected papers from the International Conference on Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, e-Business, and Applications, 2004

Guest editors: Narayan C. Debnath

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Karam, Marcel R.

Affiliations: American University of Beirut, Lebanon. E-mail: mk62@aub.edu.lb

Abstract: Commercial and research Visual Dataflow Languages (VDFLs) with object oriented features have had a substantial impact on end-user programming. Like any other object oriented programming languages, be they visual or textual, VDFLs often contain faults. In this article we investigate, from a data-flow testing perspective, the various side effects introduced by objects behavior in VDFLs. Our findings helped us establish the theoretical and practical foundations needed to adapt code-based data-flow test adequacy criteria to VDFLs, in the context of Prograph [7], and provide users of the latter with some of the error detection benefits of traditional object oriented testing.

Keywords: Software engineering, testing, object oriented testing, visual dataflow languages, evaluation

DOI: 10.3233/JCM-2006-6S102

Journal: Journal of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering, vol. 6, no. s1, pp. S9-S22, 2006