A Practical Guide to Testing Object-Oriented Software

Testing Different Types of Systems

There are many aspects of a system that affect the way it should be tested for maximum effectiveness. We still take the view that testing is a search process. Different types of systems need to be searched in different ways and for different things. We will summarize some ideas that have been presented elsewhere in this book and provide a few new ideas as well.

Reactive Systems

Object-oriented techniques have been used heavily in building systems that are driven by the inputs of a user. One important characteristic of these systems is that there is a very large number of paths through the code. Each run is different from the last. The result is often a very complicated state machine.

One technique was illustrated ...