Testing C++ Libraries for Conformance to their Specifications

While the object-oriented paradigm offers a greater potential for achieving higher interoperability among software systems as compared to other paradigms, much work needs to be done in assessing the interoperability among object-oriented systems. The work described here aims to address the issue of assessing the interoperability of object-oriented software systems on the basis of the interoperability of the class libraries involved in building such systems. In particular, we consider the compatibility of different implementations of a class library as a special case of the interoperability of class libraries and propose a specification-based testing approach to assess the compatibility of different implementations of object-oriented class libraries within one object-oriented language. Here, we discuss the proposed method and report on our current investigations involving a case study of the C++ Collection class libraries.