  Integration testing is a very important step in software testing. Existing
methods evaluate the stubbing cost for class integration test orders by
considering only the interclass direct relationships such as inheritance,
aggregation, and association, but they omit the interclass indirect
relationship caused by control coupling, which can also affect the test orders
and the stubbing cost. In this paper, we introduce an integration test order
strategy to consider control coupling. We advance the concept of transitive
relationship to describe this kind of interclass dependency and propose a new
measurement method to estimate the complexity of control coupling, which is the
complexity of stubs created for a transitive relationship. We evaluate our
integration test order strategy on 10 programs on various scales. The results
show that considering the transitive relationship when generating class
integration test orders can significantly reduce the stubbing cost for most
programs and that our integration test order strategy obtains satisfactory
results more quickly than other methods.

Software Engineering