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A History of OOT
The MOTIVE Project
- OOT at Sheffield
- About Stream X-Machines
- The SXM Testing Strategy
- Applying SXMT to OO Systems
- Complete Behavioural Testing
Bibliography
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History
The Evidence from Publications
The entries in our bibliography suggest that OO testing first emerged as a separate issue in the
late 1980s [HM87, HY88, Chu89, Fie89, LL89, PK90]. McGregor and Sykes probably
contributed the first book on OO testing [MS91], and have recently followed this
up with another [MS01]. Bashir and Goel have also produced a useful practical
guide book [BG99]. The key journals for OO testing seem to have been
JOOP(24 entries) and Object Magazine (15 entries), with
Software Testing, Verification and Reliabilitynext with just 8 entries.
The main annual event is the annual Software Quality Week in San
Francisco(18 entries). With this notable exception, however, major
conferences on both sides of the Atlantic seem to be quite hesitant about OO
testing. Of the roughly 250 papers reported at OOPSLA between 1995 and 2000 only
two have directly concerned testing [Yat95, VHK97]. (In 1995 a panel discussion
[McG95] on "OO Testing in the Real World: Lessons for All" was described in the
Proceedingsas taking place, but no actual account of the discussion was
included in any Proceedings or Addendum). Likewise, of the nearly
240 papers reported in the Proceedingsof Europe’s ECOOP throughout
the eleven years 1990 to 2000, only one directly concerns testing [FL00].
Research in the area seemed to have reached its zenith (57 entries) around
1994, and then remained fairly static, albeit at roughly half its peak level
(c.30 publication per year), for the following three years. Since then
the publication rates seem to have been in decline. The counts for 1997 and 1998
would have been significantly lower had McGregor not contributed his long series
of instructive articles in JOOP [McG97a-g, McG98a-d]. This series
confirms McGregor’s status as easily the most prolific contributor to OO testing
publishing throughout the period (38 entries), followed by Binder (17 entries),
Harrold (15 entries), and Hsia and Kung (12 entries each).
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