Summary

It is widely accepted that the inheritance relationship provides a powerful analysis and design tool. It provides a very powerful testing tool as long as inheritance is applied during design in accordance with the substitution principle. An inheritance relation holds for test suites. Test suites for subclasses can be derived from the test suite for their parent classes. Based on an analysis of the changes, we can decide what test cases need to be added, what test cases need to be rerun, what test cases need to be modified, and what test cases do not need to be run at all. PACT provides a very useful way of organizing test drivers for class testing.