Chapter 12 - Making Sure Your Applications Work—Full Life-Cycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT)

Summary

What We'll Learn in This Chapter

Why we need to test our applications.

Which traditional testing concepts still work for object-oriented (OO) development and which don't.

How to test during all phases of the development life cycle: analysis, design, construction.

How to implement test cases within program code.

How to perform function, regression, stress, and user-acceptance testing.

Testing an object-oriented (OO) application is both very similar and very different as compared to testing a procedural application. The good news, if you can call it that, is that you still need to formulate test cases, you still need to document them, you still need to run and verify them, you still need both black-and-white box tests, you still need regression testing, and you still need stress testing. The bad news, however, is that the new development concepts provided by the OO paradigm require new approaches to testing. In this chapter we will discover several key concepts required for testing object-oriented applications.

I'm a strong believer in something called full life-cycle object-oriented testing (FLOOT), which involves testing your object-oriented applications throughout the entire system development life cycle (SDLC). We'll see that there are many reasons why you want to test throughout the entire SDLC, not the least of which is if you leave testing to the end of a project it typically doesn't get done properly. In this chapter we will discuss a number of testing techniques that together form a FLOOT process (there has to be a music joke in here somewhere).