Main People Publications Research Tools
 

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.


Georgia Tech | College of Computing | Software Engineering | Aristotle Home
Updated November 1, 2001 by Tongyu Li