Revision

Chapter 8
Program Testing
• Testing is intended to show that a program does what it is intended to do and
to discover program defects before it is put into use.
• When you test software, you execute a program using artificial data.
• You check the results of the test run for errors, anomalies, or information
about the program’s non-functional attributes.
• Can reveal the presence of errors NOT their absence.

Testing is part of a more general verification and validation process, which also
includes static validation techniques.

Program testing goals

• To demonstrate to the developer and the customer that the software
meets its requirements.
✓ For custom software, this means that there should be at least one test
for every requirement in the requirements document. For generic
software products, it means that there should be tests for all of the
system features, plus combinations of these features, that will be
incorporated in the product release.

• To discover situations in which the behavior of the software is incorrect,

undesirable or does not conform to its specification.
✓ Defect testing is concerned with rooting out undesirable system
behavior such as system crashes, unwanted interactions with other
systems, incorrect computations, and data corruption.

Validation and defect testing

• The first goal leads to validation testing.
✓ You expect the system to perform correctly using a given set of test
cases that reflect the system’s expected use.

• The second goal leads to defect testing.

✓ The test cases are designed to expose defects. The test cases in defect
testing can be deliberately obscure and need not reflect how the
system is normally used.
Testing process goals
1. Validation testing:
• To demonstrate to the developer and the system customer that the
software meets its requirements.
• A successful test shows that the system operates as intended.

2. Defect testing:
• To discover faults or defects in the software where its behavior is incorrect
or not in conformance with its specification.
• A successful test is a test that makes the system perform incorrectly and so
exposes a defect in the system.

An input-output model of program testing

Verification vs validation
Verification Validation

"Are we building the product right”. "Are we building the right product”.

The software should conform to its The software should do what the user
specification. really requires.
V & V confidence
• Aim of V & V is to establish confidence that the system is ‘fit for purpose’.
• Depends on system’s purpose, user expectations and marketing environment.
1. Software purpose:
✓ The level of confidence depends on how critical the software is to an
organization.
2. User expectations:
✓ Users may have low expectations of certain kinds of software.
3. Marketing environment:
✓ Getting a product to market early may be more important than finding
defects in the program.

Inspections and testing

• Software inspections. Concerned with analysis of the static system
representation to discover problems (static verification)
✓ May be supplemented by tool-based document and code analysis.

• Software testing. Concerned with exercising and observing product behavior

(dynamic verification)
✓ The system is executed with test data and its operational behavior is
observed.

Software inspections
• These involve people examining the source representation with the aim of
discovering anomalies and defects.

• Inspections do not require execution of a system so may be used before

implementation.
 • They may be applied to any representation of the system (requirements,
design, configuration data, test data, etc.).

• They have been shown to be an effective technique for discovering program

errors.

Advantages of inspections
1. During testing, errors can mask (hide) other errors. Because inspection is a
static process, you don’t have to be concerned with interactions between errors.

2. Incomplete versions of a system can be inspected without additional costs. If a

program is incomplete, then you need to develop specialized test harnesses to
test the parts that are available.

3. As well as searching for program defects, an inspection can also consider

broader quality attributes of a program, such as compliance with standards,
portability, and maintainability.

Inspections and testing

• Inspections and testing are complementary and not opposing verification
techniques.
• Both should be used during the V & V process.
• Inspections can check conformance with a specification but not conformance
with the customer’s real requirements.
• Inspections cannot check non-functional characteristics such as performance,
usability, etc.

A model of the software testing process

Stages of testing
1. Development testing, where the system is tested during development
to discover bugs and defects.

2. Release testing, where a separate testing team test a complete version

of the system before it is released to users.
3. User testing, where users or potential users of a system test the system in their
own environment.

Development testing
1. Development testing includes all testing activities that are carried out by the
team developing the system.

2. Unit testing, where individual program units or object classes are tested. Unit
testing should focus on testing the functionality of objects or methods.

3. Component testing, where several individual units are integrated to create

composite components.

4. Component testing should focus on testing component interfaces.

5. System testing, where some or all the components in a system are integrated
and the system is tested. System testing should focus on testing component
interactions.

Unit testing
• Unit testing is the process of testing individual components in isolation.
• It is a defect testing process.
• Units may be:
1. Individual functions or methods within an object
2. Object classes with several attributes and methods
3. Composite components with defined interfaces used to access their
functionality.

Object class testing

• Complete test coverage of a class involves.
1. Testing all operations associated with an object.
2. Setting and interrogating all object attributes.
3. Exercising the object in all possible states.
• Inheritance makes it more difficult to design object class tests as the
information to be tested is not localized.

Automated testing
• Whenever possible, unit testing should be automated so that tests are run
and checked without manual intervention.

• In automated unit testing, you make use of a test automation framework

(such as JUnit) to write and run your program tests.
 • Unit testing frameworks provide generic test classes that you extend to create
specific test cases. They can then run all of the tests that you have
implemented and report, often through some GUI, on the success of
otherwise of the tests.

Automated test components

1. A setup part, where you initialize the system with the test case, namely
the inputs and expected outputs.

2. A call part, where you call the object or method to be tested.

3. An assertion part where you compare the result of the call with the
expected result. If the assertion evaluates to true, the test has been
successful. If false, then it has failed.

Unit test effectiveness

• The test cases should show that, when used as expected, the component that
you are testing does what it is supposed to do.

• If there are defects in the component, these should be revealed by test cases.

• This leads to 2 types of unit test case:

1. The first of these should reflect normal operation of a program and
should show that the component works as expected.

2. The other kind of test case should be based on testing experience

of where common problems arise. It should use abnormal inputs to
check that these are properly processed and do not
crash the component.

Testing strategies
1. Partition testing, where you identify groups of inputs that have common
characteristics and should be processed in the same way.
✓ You should choose tests from within each of these groups.

2. Guideline-based testing, where you use testing guidelines to choose test cases.
✓ These guidelines reflect previous experience of the kinds of errors that
programmers often make when developing components.
Partition testing
• Input data and output results often fall into different classes where all
members of a class are related.
• Each of these classes is an equivalence partition or domain where the
program behaves in an equivalent way for each class member.
• Test cases should be chosen from each partition.

Equivalence partitioning

Equivalence partitions
Testing guidelines (sequences)
• Test software with sequences which have only a single value.
• Use sequences of different sizes in different tests.
• Derive tests so that the first, middle and last elements of the sequence are
accessed.
• Test with sequences of zero length.

General testing guidelines

1. Choose inputs that force the system to generate all error messages.
2. Design inputs that cause input buffers to overflow
3. Repeat the same input or series of inputs numerous times.
4. Force invalid outputs to be generated.
5. Force computation results in being too large or too small.

Component testing
• Software components are often composite components that are made up of
several interacting objects.

For example, in the weather station system, the reconfiguration component

includes objects that deal with each aspect of the reconfiguration.

• You access the functionality of these objects through the defined component
interface.
• Testing composite components should therefore focus on showing that the
component interface behaves according to its specification.

You can assume that unit tests on the individual objects within the component
have been completed.

Interface testing
Interface testing
• Objectives are to detect faults due to interface errors or invalid assumptions
about interfaces.
• Interface types
1. Parameter interfaces Data passed from one method or procedure to
another.
2. Shared memory interfaces Block of memory is shared between
procedures or functions.
3. Procedural interfaces Sub-system encapsulates a set of procedures to be
called by other sub-systems.
4. Message passing interfaces Sub-systems request services from other
sub-systems.

Interface errors
1. Interface misuse
✓ A calling component calls another component and makes an error in its
use of its interface e.g. parameters in the wrong order.

2. Interface misunderstanding
✓ A calling component embeds assumptions about the behavior of the
called component which are incorrect.

3. Timing errors
✓ The called and the calling component operate at different speeds and
out-of-date information is accessed.

Interface testing guidelines

• Design tests so that parameters to a called procedure are at the extreme
ends of their ranges.
• Always test pointer parameters with null pointers.
• Design tests which cause the component to fail.
• Use stress testing in message passing systems.
• In shared memory systems, vary the order in which components are activated.

System testing
• System testing during development involves integrating components to
create a version of the system and then testing the integrated system.
• The focus in system testing is testing the interactions between components.
• System testing checks that components are compatible, interact correctly
and transfer the right data at the right time across their interfaces.
• System testing tests the emergent behavior of a system.
System and component testing
• During system testing, reusable components that have been separately
developed and off-the-shelf systems may be integrated with newly developed
components. The complete system is then tested.

• Components developed by different team members or sub-teams may be

integrated at this stage. System testing is a collective rather than an individual
process.

In some companies, system testing may involve separate testing teams with no
involvement from designers and programmers.

Use-case testing
• The use-cases developed to identify system interactions can be used as a
basis for system testing.

• Each use case usually involves several system components so testing the use
case forces these interactions to occur.

• The sequence diagrams associated with the use case document the
components and interactions that are being tested.

Collect weather data sequence Chart

Testing policies

• Exhaustive system testing is impossible so testing policies which define the

required system test coverage may be developed.
• Examples of testing policies:
1. All system functions that are accessed through menus should be tested.
2. Combinations of functions (e.g. text formatting) that are accessed through
the same menu must be tested.
3. Where user input is provided, all functions must be tested with both
correct and incorrect input.

Test-driven development
• Test-driven development (TDD) is an approach to program development in
which your inter-leave testing and code development.
• Tests are written before code and ‘passing’ the tests is the critical driver of
development.
• You develop code incrementally, along with a test for that increment. You
don’t move on to the next increment until the code that you have developed
passes its test.
• TDD was introduced as part of agile methods such as Extreme Programming.
However, it can also be used in plan-driven development processes.

Test-driven development

TDD process activities

1. Start by identifying the increment of functionality that is required. This
should normally be small and implementable in a few lines of code.
2. Write a test for this functionality and implement this as an automated test.
3. Run the test, along with all other tests that have been implemented.
Initially, you have not implemented the functionality so the new test
will fail.
4. Implement the functionality and re-run the test.
5. Once all tests run successfully, you move on to implementing the next
chunk of functionality.
Benefits of test-driven development
1. Code coverage
✓ Every code segment that you write has at least one associated test, so
all code written has at least one test.

2. Regression testing
✓ A regression test suite is developed incrementally as a program is
developed.

3. Simplified debugging
✓ When a test fails, it should be obvious where the problem lies. The
newly written code needs to be checked and modified.

4. System documentation
✓ The tests themselves are a form of documentation that describe what
the code should be doing.

Regression testing
• Regression testing is testing the system to check that changes have not
‘broken’ previously working code.

• In a manual testing process, regression testing is expensive but, with

automated testing, it is simple and straightforward. All tests are rerun
every time a change is made to the program.

• Tests must run ‘successfully’ before the change is committed.

Release testing
• Release testing is the process of testing a particular release of a system that is
intended for use outside of the development team.
• The primary goal of the release testing process is to convince the supplier of
the system that it is good enough for use.
✓ Release testing, therefore, has to show that the system delivers its
specified functionality, performance and dependability, and that it does
not fail during normal use.

Release testing is usually a black box testing process where tests are only derived
from the system specification.

Release testing and system testing

• Release testing is a form of system testing.
• Important differences:
 1. A separate team that has not been involved in the system development
should be responsible for release testing.

2. System testing by the development team should focus on discovering

bugs in the system (defect testing). The objective of release testing is to
check that the system meets its requirements and is good enough for
external use (validation testing).

Requirements based Testing

• Requirements-based testing involves examining each requirement and
developing a test or tests for it.
• MHC-PMS requirements:
✓ If a patient is known to be allergic to any particular medication, then
prescription of that medication shall result in a warning message being
issued to the system user.
✓ If a prescriber chooses to ignore an allergy warning, they shall provide a
reason why this has been ignored.

Requirements tests
• Set up a patient record with no known allergies. Prescribe medication for
allergies that are known to exist. Check that a warning message is not issued
by the system.

• Set up a patient record with a known allergy. Prescribe the medication to that
the patient is allergic to, and check that the warning is issued by the system.

• Set up a patient record in which allergies to two or more drugs are recorded.
Prescribe both of these drugs separately and check that the correct warning
for each drug is issued.

• Prescribe two drugs that the patient is allergic to. Check that two warnings are
correctly issued.

• Prescribe a drug that issues a warning and overrule that warning. Check that
the system requires the user to provide information explaining why the
warning was overruled.

Features tested by Scenario

1. Authentication by logging on to the system.
2. Downloading and uploading specified patient records to a laptop.
3. Home visit scheduling.
4. Encryption and decryption of patient records on a mobile device.
5. Record retrieval and modification.
 6. Links with the drugs database that maintains side-effect information.
7. The system for call prompting.

Performance testing
• Part of release testing may involve testing the emergent properties of a
system, such as performance and reliability.
• Tests should reflect the profile of use of the system.
• Performance tests usually involve planning a series of tests where the load is
steadily increased until the system performance becomes unacceptable.
• Stress testing is a form of performance testing where the system is
deliberately overloaded to test its failure behavior.

User testing
1. User or customer testing is a stage in the testing process in which users or
customers provide input and advice on system testing.
2. User testing is essential, even when comprehensive system and release
testing have been carried out.
3. The reason for this is that influences from the user’s working environment
have a major effect on the reliability, performance, usability and robustness
of a system. These cannot be replicated in a testing environment.

Types of user testing

1. Alpha testing
✓ Users of the software work with the development team to test the
software at the developer’s site.
2. Beta testing
✓ A release of the software is made available to users to allow them to
experiment and to raise problems that they discover with the
system developers.
3. Acceptance testing
✓ Customers test a system to decide whether or not it is ready to be
accepted from the system developers and deployed in the customer
environment. Primarily for custom systems.

The acceptance testing process

Stages in the acceptance testing process.
1. Define acceptance criteria.
2. Plan acceptance testing
3. Derive acceptance tests.
4. Run acceptance tests.
5. Negotiate test results.
6. Reject/accept system.

Agile methods and acceptance testing

• In agile methods, the user/customer is part of the development team and is
responsible for making decisions on the acceptability of the system.

• Tests are defined by the user/customer and are integrated with other tests in
that they are run automatically when changes are
made.

• There is no separate acceptance testing process.

• Main problem here is whether or not the embedded user is ‘typical’ and can
represent the interests of all system stakeholders.

Questions
1. https://quizlet.com/445098903/chapter-8-software-engineering-global-
edition-2019-10th-sommerville-flash-cards/
2. https://quizlet.com/253573948/software-engineering-ch8-flash-cards/