To: honors
Subject: honors project

Honors Assignment 3:
====================

Due: November 26.

Students may work in groups of 2 or 3. Build your own teams.

This project replaces the "regular" project for honors students.

Automating The Testing of a Law of Demeter Checker

Software testing is a very important stage in software development.
Automating of the testing process helps improve the quality
of the software.

Assume you are a software tester for a Law of Demeter checker project whose
objective is to develop a program to check if a Java program follows
the object form of the Law of Demeter. The
checker program has been implemented in AspectJ (www.aspectj.org) and if
you compile the checker program with the program that is being checked (base
program)
using the AspectJ compiler and run the main class of the base program, then
there is an output from the checker program to state for each method call,
if it is a legal call in terms of the Law of Demeter. If yes, then the checker
program should give the reasons why it is a legal call (e.g., the target is
an immediate part of 'this' object, or an argument object or a newly constructed
object in the context of the method execution or a return value from a
method call on 'this' object); otherwise, it should report a violation. For
all method calls, the checker program should also report the
line number and in what .java file. For example, the following is an output
from the checker program.

     Legal call at Foo.java:10; Reasons: Argument,Immediate Part,Newly Constructed Object.
     Legal call at Foo.java:11; Reasons: Immediate Part.
     Violation Found at Foo.java:12.
     Violation Found at Foo.java:13.
     Legal call at Foo.java:14; Reasons:Immediate Part,Return Value.
     Legal call at Foo.java:15; Reasons:Immediate Part,Return Value.
     

You are responsible to write a DemeterJ/DJ program to make the testing
process automated, i.e, you have an input file of expected output and you
run the checker program and check if the output of the checker program
is the 'same' as the one expected, if yes, then the checker has passed
the test case; otherwise, there is something wrong. The 'same' here does not
mean literally the same; you should allow some flexiblity in the format. For
example, you should view the following lines to be the 'same':

      Legal call at Foo.java:10; Reasons:Argument,Immediate Part,Newly Constructed Object.
      Legal call at  Foo.java :10 ; Reasons : Immediate Part, Argument,Newly Constructed Object.
     

The spaces are irrelevant and should not be used to
decide if two outputs are the same. In the reasons section of 'Legal call',
the order of the reasons is not important and what is important is only
the number of reasons and the actual reasons. You can view 'Legal call','at',
'Reasons','Argument','Immediate Part','Newly Constructed Object','Return Value'
and 'Violation Found' as keywords and ':','.' should be viewed as reserved
delimiter. If it is a 'Legal call', then the 'Reasons' section must appear
after the filename and line number as shown earlier.

Basically, you need to write a class dictionary to define the
language of output reports
and construct a report object r1 from a file stating the  expected output and you
run the checker program to get a report object r2 from it. 
Then you traverse the report
objects r1 and r2 to check if they 'match' each other.

Try to make your testing process as automated as much as you can.

Hints:

Use the LoD checker in directory LoD-checker.

File LoD-checker/README explains how to use it.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/lieber/com3205/f02/hw/4/hw4-SE.txt
Part 3 and also Part 2
describes what it does.

Be ready for new releases of the testing software as 
you work on your automated testing tool.
There are wrinkles in the program as it is now.
Does your testing retrieve them?

You may change the output of the Law of Demeter Checker in 
any way you deem necessary.
Synchronize the output with your class dictionary design.

You may use DJ for expressing the behavior. But using DemeterJ
only would produce a faster result.

Any questions to: com1205-grader which reaches Pengcheng and me.