Who Should Read This Book?

We have written this book for

• Programmers who already work in testing software, but want to know more about testing object-oriented software.

• Managers who are responsible for software development and who would like to know how and where testing fits into a plan.

• Developers who are responsible for testing the software they produce and who should take testing issues into consideration during the analysis, design, and coding activities.

With such a wide audience, we struggled with the level of detail we needed to include about object-oriented development and testing the basic concepts associated with software testing, object-oriented programming, and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) to express analysis and design results. We decided to provide brief overviews of these topic areas what we consider the minimum a reader needs to know to make sense of what we have to say. When we need to resort to code, we use C++ and Java. The approaches and techniques we present apply to all object-oriented programs, not just to those written in C++ and Java.

We have assumed the following software-development scenario, which we consider to be ideal:

• The process must be incremental, with iterations that occur within each increment.

• The models expressed in UML must be available.

• The software design must be in accordance with good design principles with respect to the use of inheritance, data hiding, abstraction, low coupling, and high cohesion.

However, we realize that most organizations have their own processes and notations. Consequently, our focus is primarily on principles and techniques.