Extracting Generally Applicable Patterns from Object-Oriented Programs for the Purpose of Test Case Creation

This paper presents an experiment performed on three large open source applications. The applications were instrumented automatically with a total of 10,494 instrumentation points. The purpose of the instrumentation was to collect and store data during the execution of each application that later could be analyzed off-line. Data analysis, on the collected data, allowed for the creation of test cases (test data, test fixtures and test evaluators) in addition to finding object message patterns for object-oriented software.