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The ACCU passes on review copies of computer books to its members for them to review. The result is a large, high quality collection of book reviews by programmers, for programmers. Currently there are 1949 reviews in the database and more every month.
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Title:
Testing Object-Oriented Systems
Author:
Robert Binder
ISBN:
0 201 80938 9
Publisher:
Addison-Wesley
Pages:
1190
Price:
£49-99
Reviewer:
Silvia de Beer
Subject:
testing
Appeared in:
OL38
The book is intended for OO developers who want to learn how to add testing software to their applications. The book is not intended to be read from cover to cover. However, by just dipping in, it might be difficult to find useful practical advice if you have no background in testing.

The book is divided into four parts; preliminaries, models, patterns and tools. The last part is the most practical. It advises how to include assertions to check for invariants, pre and post conditions. Examples are given for all the main OO languages. Test harness design is discussed, i.e. how to design classes that can execute the code to be tested. The second part of the book is the most theoretical and quite difficult. It discusses how to develop decision tables, combinational formulas to derive truth. State machines and their implications for testing are discussed. It is interesting to see how complex those topics are, but it is difficult to grasp some simple advice to apply to your software development.

The third part of the book describes the testing to be applied on different levels of a system: testing for a class, a component, a subsystem, an application and integration and regression testing. The author knows a lot about OO testing and gives many literature references. It might have been worth making a 300 page abstract, with the most useful principles to make developers really start testing their code. Not many developers will study 1200 pages.