Testing complex compositions

Posted by phlipsy on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by phlipsy
Published on 2014-06-13T04:30:23Z Indexed on 2014/06/13 9:40 UTC
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design-patterns

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testing

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composition

I have a rather large collection of classes which check and mutate a given data structure. They can be composed via the composition pattern into arbitrarily complex tree-like structures. The final product contains a lot of these composed structures.

My question is now: How can I test those? Albeit it is easy to test every single unit of these compositions, it is rather expensive to test the whole compositions in the following sense:

Testing the correct layout of the composition-tree results in a huge number of test cases
Changes in the compositions result in a very laborious review of every single test case

What is the general guideline here?

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