Integration object-oriented software testing and metrics

Software testing methodologies and metrics are key issues to improve and assure software quality. They are important areas in the research of Software Engineering. However, not many focus on the testing criteria and metrics evaluation of a class hierarchy. This paper introduces an important concept named URI (Unit Repeated Inheritance) to realize integrated object-oriented testing and object-oriented metrics. The approach describes an ILT (Inheritance Level Technique) method as a guide to test object-oriented software errors and measure the software complexity of a class hierarchy. The proposed technique shows that inheritance has a close relation to object-oriented software complexity and reveals that overuse of repeated (multiple) inheritance will increase software complexity and be prone to implicit software errors. Also, two test criteria: intra level first and inter level first are presented.