An environment to support micro-incremental class development

Incremental development and testing is widely cited as one advantage of the object-oriented paradigm. To date, most of the work in this area emphasizes incremental development at the “macro” level, i.e., at the application or class hierarchy levels. We believe that incremental development should also be exploited at the individual class level. In particular, classes may contain a variety of methods that place objects of the class into relatively complex states. By organizing and developing an individual class in an incremental fashion, one can (a) develop and test “partial classes” and (b) generate simple states for test objects prior to generating more complex ones. This process realizes two benefits: it simplifies debugging by reducing the size of the search space when tracking down defects, and it makes regression testing more efficient. This paper reports on a development environment designed to support “micro-incremental” class development. This environment integrates several different components and techniques. We discuss each component of the environment individually, and then illustrate the use of the environment in a case study.