Check out the new USENIX Web site.



next up previous
Next: Testability of a Up: Metric Definition Previous: Visibility Component of

Testability of a Method

The testability of a method, is dependent on the visiblity component of the method. We define the testability of a method in a class to be:

To make the testability estimate of a method a true indicator of the effort needed to test the method, we take the constant to be the number of unique objects that participate in the calculation of the metric. That is, we count the objects used as explicit input parameters, implicit input parameters, return objects and exception objects. We do not include the implicit output objects nor the pass by reference, explicit parameters in the count. This constant is a reasonable choice because its value indicates the maximum number of objects whose state may have been changed incorrectly.


John McGregor
Sun May 5 14:43:24 EDT 1996