Object Oriented Testing

What is Object-Oriented?
This is an interesting question, answered by many scientists. I will just give a brief of the same.
"Objects" are re-usable components. General definition of "Object-Oriented Programming" is that which combines data structures with functions to create re-usable objects.

What are the various Object Oriented Life Cycle Models?
What is mainly required in OOLife Cycle is that there should be iterations between phases. This is very important. One such model which explains the importance of these iterations is the Fountain Model.
This Fountain Model was proposed by Henderson-Sellers and Edwards in 1990. Various phases in the Fountain Model are as follows:
Requirements Phase
Object-Oriented Analysis Phase
Object-Design Phase
Implementation Phase
Implementation and Integration Phase
Operations Mode
Maintenance

Various phases in Fountain Model overlap:
Requirements and Object Oriented Analysis Phase
Object-Oriented Design, Implementation and Integration Phase
Operations Mode and Maintenance Phases.

Also, each phase will have its own iterations. By adopting the Object-Oriented Application Development, it is scientifically proved that the Maintenance of the software has a tremendous drop. The software is easy to manage and adding new functionality or removing the old is well within controll. This can be achieved without disturbing the overall functionality or other objects. This can help reduce time in software maintenance.

My aim is not to provide informaiton on Object Oriented Application development, but to provide information and techniques as to how to go about the testing of Object Oriented Systems.

Testing of Object Oriented Testing is the same as usual testing when you follow the conventional Black Box testing (of course there will be differences depending on your Test Strategy).

But, otherwise, while testing Object Oriented Systems, we tend to adopt different Test Strategies. This is because, the development cycle is different from the usual cycle(s). Why? This is an interesting question. Why is testing of Object Oriented Systems different? First, let us cover the basics of OOPS.

The Object Oriented Methodology
Let us look at the Object Modelling Technique(OMT) methodology:
Analysis:Starting from the statement of the problem, the analyst buildsa model of the real-world situation showing its important properties.

System Design:The system designer makes high-level decisions about the overall architecture. During system design, the target system is organized into subsystems based on both the analysis structure and the proposed architecture.

Object Design:The object designer builds a design model based on the analysis model but containing implementation detials. The designer adds details to the design model in accordance with the strategy established during system design.

Implementation:The object classes and relationships developed during object design are finally translated into a particular programming language, database, or hardware implementation.

The Three Models
The OMT methodology uses three kinds of models to describe the Object Oriented System:
1. Object Model, describing the objects in the system and their relationships, which are static structures.
2. Dynamic Model, describing the interactions among objects in the system, which change over the time.
3. Functional Model, describing the data transformations of the system.

Object Oriented Themes
1. Abstraction.
2. Encapsulation.
3. Polymorphism.

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