APPROACH TO CONSTRUCTING SOFTWARE UNIT TESTING TOOLS

Software unit testing studies how to test a portion of a program, call ed a software unit or unit, which may be a procedure, a function, or a collection of procedures or functions. Automated test drivers have be en used to control the execution of the unit under test. When using te st drivers, software stubs need to be constructed to replace all proce dures called by the unit under test as the unit has been isolated from its operational environment. However, the automatic construction of s tubs have not yet been achieved, and manual production of stubs proves to be difficult and time-consuming. An approach is presented called t he direct test access method, for constructing software unit testing t ools which provide the same capabilities as the automated test drivers but avoids the overhead of constructing stubs.