Abstract
The Object Relation Diagram (ORD) of a program is a class interdependence diagram which has important applications in integration testing, integration coverage analysis and regression testing. The precision of the ORD, that is how closely it reflects what actually can occur during program execution, directly affects the efficiency (and therefore the practicality) of its usage. This paper makes three key contributions to the use of ORDs in testing. First, we develop the Extended Object Relation Diagram (ExtORD), a version of the ORD designed for use in integration coverage analysis. The ExtORD shows the specific statement resulting in an interclass dependence and can be easily constructed by extending techniques for ORD construction. Second, we develop a general algorithm for ORD construction, parameterized by class analysis. Third and most importantly, we show empirically that relatively precise class analyses can be used to construct precise ORDs and ExtORDs, whose size improvement over earlier techniques is on average 56%-60% or 34%-38% respectively, (depending on the class analysis). In addition, more precise class analyses substantially reduce the size of class firewalls, that set of classes affected by a change to a particular class, which in turn diminishes the effort required for regression testing.