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Purpose

This ECOOP 2010 workshop is intended to draw together both researchers and practitioners who are dealing with the testing of object-oriented software, in order to report on the state of their research and to exchange their experiences.

Object-oriented software presents a particular challenge to the software testing community. This is due to the many dependencies between classes and components, which occur as a result of reuse and non-redundancy. Using object-oriented programming, the amount of code is significantly reduced compared to traditional procedural programming, but the number of potential paths through the software increases due to polymorphism, inheritance and collaboration. This means shifting effort from development to testing. This phenomenon has been documented in the test literature by Robert Binder, Shel Siegel, Mark Harman, Jeff Offutt, Erich Gamma, and many others working in the field of testing. Boris Beizer, who has written several books on testing, remarks that the developers of object-oriented software are astounded by the amount of testing they must perform in order to obtain adequate coverage of all potential usages with all possible exceptions. Testing effort can be two to three times greater than the effort involved in designing and coding. In fact, the very purpose of object-oriented development could be negated unless economical means of assuring the sufficient quality of software are found.

Topics

Contributions are solicited for instance on the following topics:

  • Economics of object-oriented software testing
  • Evaluating the effectiveness of testing object-oriented systems
  • Unit testing with object-oriented languages
  • Integration testing of object-oriented systems
  • Model-based testing
  • Tools for testing object-oriented software
  • Metrics for measuring test quality
  • Measuring testability of object-oriented software

Intended audience and format

Since this is a workshop, the emphasis will be on discussion and interchange of ideas, but participants are also requested to submit papers to present (up to 8 pages long, but shorter papers are preferred). Those that are accepted will be included in a printed proceedings. The authors of the papers will be expected to present them; about 30 minutes, including the time for questions and comments, will be allocated to each presentation. Parallel to the paper presentations there will be a tool demonstration giving tool developers a chance to show their tools to the other participants. These tools should also be described in a two to four page paper to be included in the proceedings.

Testing practitioners are encouraged to participate. Reports from the field on real project experience will be given preference in the selection, but also research papers are sought. It is hoped to put together a mixed program with both industrial and research reports.

Submission deadline

The deadline for submitting contributions is 19 April 2010 26 April 2010. See more info here.