A brief article on Testing.

INTRODUCTION:

Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate review of specification, design and coding. In fact, testing is the one step in the software engineering process that could be viewed as destructive rather than constructive.

A strategy for software testing integrates software test case design methods into a well-planned series of steps that result in the successful construction of software.The underlying motivation of program testing

is to affirm software quality with methods that can economically and effectively apply to both strategic to both large and small-scale systems.

STRATEGIC APPROACH TO SOFTWARE TESTING:

The software engineering process can be viewed as a spiral. Initially system engineering defines the role of software and leads to software requirement analysis where the information domain, functions, behavior, performance, constraints and validation criteria for software are established. Moving inward along the spiral, we come to design and finally to coding. To develop computer software we spiral in along streamlines that decrease the level of abstraction on each turn.

A strategy for software testing may also be viewed in the context of the spiral. Unit testing begins at the vertex of the spiral and concentrates on each unit of the software as implemented in source code.

UNIT TESTING:

Unit testing focuses verification effort on the smallest unit of software design, the module. The unit testing we have is white box oriented and some modules the steps are conducted in parallel.

 1. WHITE BOX TESTING:

 This type of testing ensures that

       1.All independent paths have been exercised at least once.

 2.All logical decisions have been exercised on their true and false sides.

       3.All loops are executed at their boundaries and within their operational bounds.

       4.All internal data structures have been exercised to assure their validity.

                  To follow the concept of white box testing we have tested each form .we have created independently to verify that Data flow is correct, All conditions are exercised to check their validity, All loops are executed on their boundaries.

2. BASIC PATH TESTING:

Established technique of flow graph with Cyclomatic complexity was used to derive test cases for all the functions. The main steps in deriving test cases were:

Use the design of the code and draw correspondent flow graph.

 Determine the Cyclomatic complexity of resultant flow graph, using formula:

V(G)=E-N+2 or

V(G)=P+1 or

V(G)=Number Of Regions

Where V(G) is Cyclomatic complexity,

E is the number of edges,

N is the number of flow graph nodes,

P is the number of predicate nodes.

Determine the basis of set of linearly independent paths.

3. CONDITIONAL TESTING:

In this part of the testing each of the conditions were tested to both true and false aspects. And all the resulting paths were tested. So that each path that may be generate on particular condition is traced to uncover any possible errors.

4. DATA FLOW TESTING:

This type of testing selects the path of the program according to the location of definition and use of variables. This kind of testing was used only when some local variable were declared. The definition-use chain method was used in this type of testing. These were particularly useful in nested statements.

 5.LOOP TESTING:

In this type of testing all the loops are tested to all the limits possible. The following exercise was adopted for all loops:

All the loops were tested at their limits, just above them and just below them.

All the loops were skipped at least once.

For nested loops test the inner most loop first and then work outwards.

For concatenated loops the values of dependent loops were set with the help of connected loop.

Unstructured loops were resolved into nested loops or concatenated loops and tested as above.

Each unit has been separately tested by the development team itself and all the input have been validated.