Programmatic
Testing of the Standard Template Library Containers
by D. Hoffman, J. MacDonald
and P. Strooper
| |
Programmatic
Testing of the Standard Template Library Containers
by D. Hoffman, J. MacDonald
and P. Strooper
|
| formalWARE
project
formalWARE
formalWARE
|
Abstract In 1968, McIlroy proposed a software industry based on reusable components, serving roughly the same role that chips do in the hardware industry. After 30 years, McIlroy's vision is becoming a reality. In particular, the C++ Standard Template Library (STL) is an ANSI standard and is being shipped with C++ compilers. While considerable attention has been given to techniques for developing components, little is known about testing these components. This paper describes an STL conformance test suite currently under development. Test suites for all of the STL containers have been written, demonstrating the feasibility of thorough and highly automated testing of industrial component libraries. We describe affordable test suites that provide good code and boundary value coverage, including the thousands of cases that naturally occur from combinations of boundary values. We show how two simple oracles can provide fully automated output checking for all the containers. We refine the traditional categories of black-box and white-box testing to specification-based, implementation-based and implementation-dependent testing, and show how these three categories highlight the key cost/thoroughness tradeoffs.
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