Software Testing and Quality Assurance

Theory and Practice

Chapter 8
System Test Categories

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 1
 Outline of the Chapter
• Taxonomy of System Tests
• Basic Tests
• Functionality Tests
• Robustness Tests
• Interoperability Tests
• Performance Tests
• Scalability Tests
• Stress Tests
• Load and Stability Tests
• Regression Tests
• Documentation Tests
• Regulatory Tests
– Software Safety
– Safety Assurance

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 2
 Taxonomy of System Tests

Figure 8.1: Types of system tests

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 3
 Taxonomy of System Tests
• Basic tests provide an evidence that the system can be installed,
configured and be brought to an operational state

• Functionality tests provide comprehensive testing over the full

range of the requirements, within the capabilities of the system

• Robustness tests determine how well the system recovers from

various input errors and other failure situations

• Inter-operability tests determine whether the system can inter-

operate with other third party products

• Performance tests measure the performance characteristics of the

system, e.g., throughput and response time, under various conditions
Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 4
 Taxonomy of System Tests
• Scalability tests determine the scaling limits of the system, in terms
of user scaling, geographic scaling, and resource scaling
• Stress tests put a system under stress in order to determine the
limitations of a system and, when it fails, to determine the manner in
which the failure occurs
• Load and Stability tests provide evidence that the system remains
stable for a long period of time under full load
• Reliability tests measure the ability of the system to keep operating
for a long time without developing failures
• Regression tests determine that the system remains stable as it
cycles through the integration of other subsystems and through
maintenance tasks
• Documentation tests ensure that the system’s user guides are
accurate and usable

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 5
 Basic Tests

Figure 8.2: Types of basic tests

• Boot: Boot tests are designed to verify that the system can boot up its software
image (or, build) from the supported boot options

• Upgrade/Downgrade: Upgrade/downgrade tests are designed to verify that the

system software can be upgraded or downgraded (rollback) in a graceful manner

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 6
 Basic Tests
• Light Emitting Diode: The LED (Light Emitting Diode) tests are
designed to verify that the system LED status indicators functioning
as desired

• Diagnostic: Diagnostic tests are designed to verify that the hardware

components (or, modules) of the system are functioning as desired
– Power-On Self Test
– Ethernet Loop Back Test
– Bit Error Test

• Command line Interface: Command Line Interface (CLI) tests are

designed to verify that the system can be configured

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 7
 Functionality Tests

Figure 8.3: Types of functionality tests

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 8
 Functionality Tests
• Communication Systems Tests
– These tests are designed to verify the implementation of the communication
systems as specified in the customer requirements specification
– Four types of communication systems tests are recommended
• Basis interconnection tests
• Capability tests
• Behavior tests
• System resolution tests
• Module Tests
– Module Tests are designed to verify that all the modules function individually
as desired within the systems
– The idea here is to ensure that individual modules function correctly within the
whole system.
• For example, an Internet router contains modules such as line cards,
system controller, power supply, and fan tray. Tests are designed to verify
each of the functionalities

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 9
 Functionality Tests
• Logging and Tracing Tests
– Logging and Tracing Tests are designed to verify the configurations and
operations of logging and tracing
– This also includes verification of “flight data recorder: non-volatile Flash
memory” logs when the system crashes
• Element Management Systems (EMS) Tests
– EMS tests verifies the main functionalities, which are to manage, monitor and
upgrade the communication systems network elements
– It includes both EMS client and EMS servers functionalities
Note: Read the SNMP example described in the book
• Management Information Base (MIB) Tests
– MIB tests are designed to verify
• Standard MIBs including MIB II
• Enterprise MIBs specific to the system
Note: Read the SNMP example described in the book

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 10
 Functionality Tests
• Graphical User Interface Tests
– Tests are designed to look-and-feel the interface to the users of an application
system
– Tests are designed to verify different components such as icons, menu bars,
dialog boxes, scroll bars, list boxes, and radio buttons
– The GUI can be utilized to test the functionality behind the interface, such as
accurate response to database queries
– Tests the usefulness of the on-line help, error messages, tutorials, and user
manuals
– The usability characteristics of the GUI is tested, which includes the following
• Accessibility: Can users enter, navigate, and exit with relative ease?
• Responsiveness: Can users do what they want and when they want in a
way that is clear?
• Efficiency: Can users do what they want to with minimum number of
steps and time?
• Comprehensibility: Do users understand the product structure with a
minimum amount of effort?

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 Functionality Tests
• Security Tests
– Security tests are designed to verify that the system meets the security
requirements
• Confidentiality
– It is the requirement that data and the processes be protected from
unauthorized disclosure
• Integrity
– It is the requirement that data and process be protected from unauthorized
modification
• Availability
– It is the requirement that data and processes be protected form the denial of
service to authorized users
– Security test scenarios should include negative scenarios such as misuse and
abuse of the software system

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 12
 Functionality Tests
• Security Tests (cont’d) : useful types of security tests includes the
following:
– Verify that only authorized accesses to the system are permitted
– Verify the correctness of both encryption and decryption algorithms for
systems where data/messages are encoded.
– Verify that illegal reading of files, to which the perpetrator is not authorized, is
not allowed
– Ensure that virus checkers prevent or curtail entry of viruses into the system
– Ensure that the system is available to authorized users when a zero-day attack
occurs
– Try to identify any “backdoors” in the system usually left open by the software
developers

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 Functionality Tests
• Feature Tests
– These tests are designed to verify any additional functionalities which are
defined in requirement specification but not covered in the functional category
discussed

– Examples
• Data conversion testing
• Cross-functionality testing

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 Robustness Tests
Robustness means how much sensitive a system is to erroneous input and changes
its operational environment

Tests in this category are designed to verify how gracefully the system behaves in
error situations and ina a changed operational environment

Figure 8.4: Types of robustness tests

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 15
 Robustness Tests
• Boundary value
– Boundary value tests are designed to cover boundary conditions, special
values, and system defaults
– The tests include providing invalid input data to the system and observing how
the system reacts to the invalid input.
• Power cycling
– Power cycling tests are executed to ensure that, when there is a power glitch in
a deployment environment, the system can recover from the glitch to be back
in normal operation after power is restored
• On-line insertion and removal
– On-line Insertion and Removal (OIR) tests are designed to ensure that on-line
insertion and removal of modules, incurred during both idle and heavy load
operations, are gracefully handled and recovered

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 Robustness Tests
• High Availability
– The concept of high availability is also known as fault tolerance
– High availability tests are designed to verify the redundancy of individual
modules, including the software that controls these modules.
– The goal is to verify that the system gracefully and quickly recovers from
hardware and software failures without adversely impacting the operation of
the system
– High availability is realized by means of proactive methods to maximize
service up-time, and to minimize the downtime
• Degraded Node
– Degraded node (also known as failure containment) tests verify the operation
of a system after a portion of the system becomes non-operational
– It is a useful test for all mission-critical applications.

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 Interoperability Tests
• Tests are designed to verify the ability of the system to inter-operate
with third party products

Note: Read the 1xEV-DO example described in the book

• The re-configuration activities during interoperability tests is known

as configuration testing

• Another kind of inter-operability tests is called (backward)

compatibility tests
– Compatibility tests verify that the system works the same way across different
platforms, operating systems, data base management systems
– Backward compatibility tests verify that the current software build flawlessly
works with older version of platforms

Software Testing and QA Theory and Practice (Chapter 8: System Test Categories) © Naik & Tripathy 18
 Performance Tests
• Tests are designed to determine the performance of the actual system
compared to the expected one
• Tests are designed to verify response time, execution time,
throughput, resource utilization and traffic rate
• One needs to be clear about the specific data to be captured in order
to evaluate performance metrics.
• For example, if the objective is to evaluate the response time, then
one needs to capture
– End-to-end response time (as seen by external user)
– CPU time
– Network connection time
– Database access time
– Network connection time
– Waiting time

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 Scalability Tests
• Tests are designed to verify that the system can scale up to its
engineering limits
• Scaling tests are conducted to ensure that the system response time
remains the same, or increases by a small amount, as the number of
users are increased.
• There are three major causes of these limitations:
– data storage limitations
– network bandwidth limitations
– speed limit
• Extrapolation is often used to predict the limit of scalability

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 Stress Tests
• The goal of stress testing is to evaluate and determine the behavior of
a software component while the offered load is in excess of its
designed capacity
• The system is deliberately stressed by pushing it to and beyond its
specified limits
• It ensures that the system can perform acceptably under worst-case
conditions, under an expected peak load. If the limit is exceeded and
the system does fail, then the recovery mechanism should be invoked
• Stress tests are targeted to bring out the problems associated with one
or more of the following:
– Memory leak
– Buffer allocation and memory carving

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 Load and Stability Tests
• Tests are designed to ensure that the system remains stable for a long
period of time under full load
• When a large number of users are introduced and applications that
run for months without restarting, a number of problems are likely to
occur:
– the system slows down
– the system encounters functionality problems
– the system crashes altogether
• Load and stability testing typically involves exercising the system
with virtual users and measuring the performance to verify whether
the system can support the anticipated load
• This kind of testing help one to understand the ways the system will
fare in real-life situations

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 Reliability Tests
• Reliability tests are designed to measure the ability of the system to
remain operational for long periods of time.
• The reliability of a system is typically expressed in terms of mean
time to failure (MTTF)
• The average of all the time intervals between successive failures is
called the MTTF
• After a failure is observed, the developers analyze and fix the
defects, which consumes some time – let us call this interval the
repair time.
• The average of all the repair times is known as the mean time to
repair (MTTR)
• Now we can calculate a value called mean time between failure
(MTBF) as MTBF = MTTF + MTTR
• The random testing technique discussed in Chapter 9 is used for
reliability measurement
• The software reliability modeling and testing is discussed in Chapter
15 in detail
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 Regression Tests
• In this category, new tests are not designed, instead, test cases are
selected from the existing pool and executed
• The main idea in regression testing is to verify that no defect has
been introduced into the unchanged portion of a system due to
changes made elsewhere in the system
• During system testing, many defects are revealed and the code is
modified to fix those defects
• One of four different scenarios can occur for each fix:
– The reported defect is fixed
– The reported defect could not be fixed inspite of making an effort
– The reported defect has been fixed, but something that used to work before has
been failing
– The reported defect could not be fixed inspite of an effort, and something that
used to work before has been failing

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 Regression Tests
• One possibility is to re-execute every test case from version n − 1 to
version n before testing anything new
• A full test of a system may be prohibitively expensive.
• A subset of the test cases is carefully selected from the existing test
suite to
– maximize the likelihood of uncovering new defects
– reduce the cost of testing

• Methods for test selection for regression testing have been discussed
in Chapter 12

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 Documentation Tests
• Documentation testing means verifying the technical accuracy and
readability of the user manuals, tutorials and the on-line help

• Documentation testing is performed at three levels:

– Read test: In this test a documentation is reviewed for clarity, organization,
flow, and accuracy without executing the documented instructions on the
system

– Hands-on test: Exercise the on-line help and verify the error messages to
evaluate their accuracy and usefulness.

– Functional test: Follow the instructions embodied in the documentation to

verify that the system works as it has been documented.

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 Regulatory Tests
• In this category, the final system is shipped to the regulatory bodies
in those countries where the product is expected to be marketed

• The idea is to obtain compliance marks on the product from various

countries

• Most of these regulatory bodies issue safety and EMC

(electromagnetic compatibility)/ EMI (electromagnetic interference)
compliance certificates (emission and immunity)

• The regulatory agencies are interested in identifying flaws in

software that have potential safety consequences

• The safety requirements are primarily based on their own published

standards

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 Software Safety
• A hazard is a state of a system or a physical situation which when
combined with certain environmental conditions, could lead to an
accident or mishap

• An accident or mishap is an unintended event or series of events that

results in death, injury, illness, damage or loss of property, or harm to
the environment

• Software safety is defined in terms of hazards

• A software in isolation cannot do physical damage. However, a

software in the context of a system and an embedding environment
could be vulnerable

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 Software Safety
Examples:

• A software module in a database application is not hazardous by

itself, but when it is embedded in a missile navigation system, it
could be hazardous

• If a missile takes a U-turn because of a software error in the

navigation system, and destroys the submarine that launched it, then
it is not a safe software

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 Safety Assurance
• There are two basic tasks performed by a safety assurance
engineering team:

– Provide methods for identifying, tracking, evaluating, and eliminating hazards

associated with a system

– Ensure that safety is embedded into the design and implementation in a timely
and cost effective manner, such that the risk created by the user/operator error
is minimized

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