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Criteria for Testing Exception-Handling Constructs in Java Programs
International Conference on Software Maintenance
September 1999, pp. 265-274
Saurabh Sinha and Mary Jean Harrold
Abstract
Exception-handling constructs provide a
mechanism for raising exceptions and a facility for
designating protected code by attaching exception
handlers to blocks of code.
Despite the frequency of their
occurrences,
the behavior of exception-handling constructs
is often the least understood and poorly tested
part of a program.
The presence of such constructs introduces
new structural elements, such as
control-flow paths, in a program.
To adequately test such programs, these new
structural elements must be considered
for coverage during structural testing.
In this paper, we describe a class of adequacy
criteria that can be used to
test the behavior of exception-handling
constructs. We present a subsumption
hierarchy of the criteria, and illustrate
the relationship of the criteria to those
found in traditional subsumption
hierarchies.
We describe techniques for generating
the testing requirements
for the criteria using
our control-flow representations.
We also describe a methodology for
applying the criteria to unit
and integration testing of programs that
contain exception-handling constructs.
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