An Integration Test Order Strategy to Consider Control Coupling

Integration testing is a very important step in software testing. Existing methods evaluate the stubbing cost for class inte-gration test orders by considering only the interclass direct relationships such as inheritance, aggregation, and associa-tion, but they omit the interclass indirect relationship caused by control coupling, which can also affect the test orders and the stubbing cost. In this paper, we introduce an integration test order strategy to consider control coupling. We ad-vance the concept of transitive relationship to describe this kind of interclass dependency and propose a new measure-ment method to estimate the complexity of control coupling, which is the complexity of stubs created for a transitive rela-tionship. We evaluate our integration test order strategy on 10 programs on various scales. The results show that consid-ering the transitive relationship when generating class integration test orders can significantly reduce the stubbing cost for most programs and that our integration test order strategy obtains satisfactory results more quickly than other methods.