A Model-Based Testing Method for Dynamic Aspect-Oriented Software

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is used to implement crosscutting concerns such as persistence and safety in program units called aspects. To ensure that these concerns behave as specified and do not introduce faults into the application, rigorous software testing practices should be applied. Even though there are statements in the literature that the adoption of AOP takes a software to get better quality, it does not provide correctness by itself. Therefore, the test remains an important activity to ensure aspects are correctly integrated into the main system. Additionally, in a dynamic environment: new aspects may be incompatible with aspects already woven; and aspects to be removed can hold the system to an inconsistent state. Available approaches in the literature do not directly investigate the problem of testing dynamic aspects within the context of a target application. This paper presents a method to apply tests in dynamic aspects that verify the interactions between aspects and classes, as well as among aspects. Aiming to support the method, we also introduce a model to represent the dynamic behavior of aspects and a new strategy to derive testing cases. To evaluate the effectiveness of the test cases generated by the method, mutation operators were applied to the model and simulated with a model checker. Results showed that the approach is capable of detecting faults in dynamic aspects interactions into a target application.