A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software

Class Testing

The fundamental unit of an object-oriented program is a class. Class testing comprises those activities associated with verifying that the implementation of a class corresponds exactly with the specification for that class. If an implementation is correct, then each of the class's instances should behave properly.

Class testing is roughly analogous to unit testing in traditional testing processes and has many of the same problems that must be addressed (see sidebar). Class testing must also address some aspects of integration testing since each object defines a level of scope in which many methods interact around a set of instance attributes. Some of the most critical issues will be discussed in the context of concurrent issues ...