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Experiences with cluster and class testing

Published: 01 September 1994 Publication History
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References

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Scott R. Tilley

The results of using a new class-level testing technique on Trouble Advisor for Customer Services (TRACS), a distributed network management system written in C++ and Eiffel, are presented. Previous releases of TRACS used system-level and cluster-level testing. A high number of defects were found during system testing, however. Fixing bugs so late in the development cycle was costly. Class testing was investigated to catch bugs earlier and thereby reduce overall maintenance costs. Numerous problems with the existing approach to class-level testing occurred, so a new technique was needed. Automated Class Exerciser (ACE) was developed. It supports the specification of class-level testing scripts. ACE was used on two releases of TRACS over a two-year period. The cited results are impressive: only one bug slipped through to system testing, compared with over 70 defects that had taken 16 person-weeks to repair in previous releases. This translated into a savings of more than 50 percent of total development time. To achieve this savings, engineers spent between 5 and 30 percent of their time on the preparation of ACE test scripts; execution of the scripts now consumes between 5 and 20 percent of the cluster development time. Interestingly, the authors report that a paradigm shift occurred among developers that caused them to design and implement classes with testability in mind (something they apparently did not do in the past). The paper provides an important example of the industrial use and refinement of an academic approach to object-oriented software testing (ACE was developed using PGMGEN, a test tool developed at the University of Victoria). The tool seems simple enough to use, yet yields real results in real-world usage. Like many papers published in the Communications of the ACM recently, this one suffers from over-generous use of fonts and colors. For example, Figure 7 shows the processing steps of the ACE tool. Unfortunately, the color scheme chosen makes the individual steps almost indistinguishable. Clearly this is not the fault of the authors, but of the publisher.

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Published: 01 September 1994
Published in CACM Volume 37, Issue 9

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