A note on inheritance and state machines

Abstract

The inheritance relationships in an object-oriented program have been shown to be a natural structure for facilitating reuse in a number of areas such as test cases. This note reports on a technique for incrementally building the state machine for a class from the state machines of its base classes. Using a style of state diagram similar to object charts provides a graphical means of displaying the resulting state machine. This incremental technique allows more complex machines to be built with less effort.