Software testing

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 1

 Objectives
● To discuss the distinctions between
validation testing and defect testing
● To describe the principles of system and
component testing
● To describe strategies for generating system
test cases
● To understand the essential characteristics
of tool used for test automation

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 2

 Topics covered
● System testing
● Component testing
● Test case design
● Test automation

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 3

 The testing process
● Component testing
• Testing of individual program components;
• Usually the responsibility of the component developer
(except sometimes for critical systems);
• Tests are derived from the developer’s experience.
● System testing
• Testing of groups of components integrated to create a
system or sub-system;
• The responsibility of an independent testing team;
• Tests are based on a system specification.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 4

 Testing phases

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 5

 Defect testing
● The goal of defect testing is to discover
defects in programs
● A successful defect test is a test which
causes a program to behave in an
anomalous way
● Tests show the presence not the absence of
defects

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 6

 Testing process goals
● 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.
● Defect testing
• To discover faults or defects in the software where its
behaviour 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 7

 The software testing process

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 8

 Testing policies
● Only exhaustive testing can show a program is free
from defects. However, exhaustive testing is
impossible,
● Testing policies define the approach to be used in
selecting system tests:
• All functions accessed through menus should be tested;
• Combinations of functions accessed through the same
menu should be tested;
• Where user input is required, all functions must be tested
with correct and incorrect input.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 9

 System testing
● Involves integrating components to create a
system or sub-system.
● May involve testing an increment to be
delivered to the customer.
● Two phases:
• Integration testing - the test team have access
to the system source code. The system is tested
as components are integrated.
• Release testing - the test team test the
complete system to be delivered as a black-box.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 10

 Integration testing
● Involves building a system from its
components and testing it for problems that
arise from component interactions.
● Top-down integration
• Develop the skeleton of the system and
populate it with components.
● Bottom-up integration
• Integrate infrastructure components then add
functional components.
● To simplify error localisation, systems should
be incrementally integrated.
©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 11
 Incremental integration testing

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 12

 Testing approaches
● Architectural validation
• Top-down integration testing is better at discovering
errors in the system architecture.
● System demonstration
• Top-down integration testing allows a limited
demonstration at an early stage in the development.
● Test implementation
• Often easier with bottom-up integration testing.
● Test observation
• Problems with both approaches. Extra code may be
required to observe tests.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 13

 Release testing
● The process of testing a release of a system
that will be distributed to customers.
● Primary goal is to increase the supplier’s
confidence that the system meets its
requirements.
● Release testing is usually black-box or
functional testing
• Based on the system specification only;
• Testers do not have knowledge of the system
implementation.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 14

 Black-box testing

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 15

 Testing guidelines
● Testing guidelines are hints for the testing
team to help them choose tests that will
reveal defects in the system
• Choose inputs that force the system to generate
all error messages;
• Design inputs that cause buffers to overflow;
• Repeat the same input or input series several
times;
• Force invalid outputs to be generated;
• Force computation results to be too large or too
small.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 16

 Testing scenario

A student in Scotland is studying American History and has been asked to write a paper
on ‘Frontier mentality in the American West from 1840 to 1880’. To do this, she needs to
find sources from a range of libraries. She logs on to the LIBSYS system and uses the
search facility to discover if she can access original documents from that time. She
discovers sources in various US university libraries and downloads copies of some of
these. However, for one document, she needs to have confirmation from her university
that she is a genuine student and that use is for non-commercial purposes. The student
then uses the facility in LIBSYS that can request such permission and registers her
request. If granted, the document will be downloaded to the registered library’s server
and printed for her. She receives a message from LIBSYS telling her that she will receive
an e-mail message when the printed document is available for collection.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 17

 System tests

1 . Test the login mechanism using correct and incorrect logins to check
that valid users are accepted and invalid users are rejected.
2 . Test the search facility using different queries against known sources to
check that the search mechanism is actually finding documents.
3 . Test the system presentation facility to check that information about
documents is displayed properly.
4. Test the mechanism to request permission for downloading.
5 . Test the e-mail response indicating that the downloaded document is
available.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 18

 Use cases
● Use cases can be a basis for deriving the
tests for a system. They help identify
operations to be tested and help design the
required test cases.
● From an associated sequence diagram, the
inputs and outputs to be created for the tests
can be identified.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 19

 Collect weather data sequence chart

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 20

 Performance testing
● Part of release testing may involve testing
the emergent properties of a system, such
as performance and reliability.
● Performance tests usually involve planning a
series of tests where the load is steadily
increased until the system performance
becomes unacceptable.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 21

 Stress testing
● Exercises the system beyond its maximum design
load. Stressing the system often causes defects to
come to light.
● Stressing the system test failure behaviour..
Systems should not fail catastrophically. Stress
testing checks for unacceptable loss of service or
data.
● Stress testing is particularly relevant to distributed
systems that can exhibit severe degradation as a
network becomes overloaded.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 22

 Component testing
● Component or unit testing is the process of
testing individual components in isolation.
● It is a defect testing process.
● Components may be:
• Individual functions or methods within an object;
• Object classes with several attributes and
methods;
• Composite components with defined interfaces
used to access their functionality.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 23

 Object class testing
● Complete test coverage of a class involves
• Testing all operations associated with an object;
• Setting and interrogating all object attributes;
• 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 localised.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 24

 Weather station object interface

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 25

 Weather station testing
● Need to define test cases for reportWeather,
calibrate, test, startup and shutdown.
● Using a state model, identify sequences of
state transitions to be tested and the event
sequences to cause these transitions
● For example:
• Waiting -> Calibrating -> Testing -> Transmitting
-> Waiting

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 26

 Interface testing
● Objectives are to detect faults due to
interface errors or invalid assumptions about
interfaces.
● Particularly important for object-oriented
development as objects are defined by their
interfaces.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 27

 Interface testing

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 28

 Interface types
● Parameter interfaces
• Data passed from one procedure to another.
● Shared memory interfaces
• Block of memory is shared between procedures or
functions.
● Procedural interfaces
• Sub-system encapsulates a set of procedures to be called
by other sub-systems.
● Message passing interfaces
• Sub-systems request services from other sub-system.s

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 29

 Interface errors
● 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.
● Interface misunderstanding
• A calling component embeds assumptions about the
behaviour of the called component which are incorrect.
● Timing errors
• The called and the calling component operate at different
speeds and out-of-date information is accessed.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 30

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 31

 Test case design
● Involves designing the test cases (inputs and
outputs) used to test the system.
● The goal of test case design is to create a
set of tests that are effective in validation and
defect testing.
● Design approaches:
• Requirements-based testing;
• Partition testing;
• Structural testing.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 32

 Requirements based testing
● A general principle of requirements
engineering is that requirements should be
testable.
● Requirements-based testing is a validation
testing technique where you consider each
requirement and derive a set of tests for that
requirement.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 33

 LIBSYS requirements

The user shall be able to search either all of the initial set of databases or select a
subset from it.
The system shall provide appropriate viewers for the user to read documents in the
document store.
Every order shall be allocated a unique identifier (ORDER_ID) that the user shall
be able to copy to the account’s permanent storage area.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 34

 LIBSYS tests

• Initiate user search for searches for items that are known to
be present and known not to be present, where the set of
databases includes 1 database.
• Initiate user searches for items that are known to be present
and known not to be present, where the set of databases
includes 2 databases
• Initiate user searches for items that are known to be present
and known not to be present where the set of databases
includes more than 2 databases.
• Select one database from the set of databases and initiate
user searches for items that are known to be present and
known not to be present.
• Select more than one database from the set of databases
and initiate searches for items that are known to be present
and known not to be present.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 35

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 36

 Equivalence partitioning

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 37

 Equivalence partitions

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 38

 Search routine specification

procedure Search (Key : ELEM ; T: SEQ of ELEM;

Found : in out BOOLEAN; L: in out ELEM_INDEX) ;

Pre-condition
-- the sequence has at least one element
T’FIRST <= T’LAST
Post-condition
-- the element is found and is referenced by L
( Found and T (L) = Key)
or
-- the element is not in the array
( not Found and
not (exists i, T’FIRST >= i <= T’LAST, T (i) = Key ))

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 39

 Search routine - input partitions
● Inputs which conform to the pre-conditions.
● Inputs where a pre-condition does not hold.
● Inputs where the key element is a member of
the array.
● Inputs where the key element is not a
member of the array.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 40

 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.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 41

 Search routine - input partitions

Sequence Element
Single value In sequence
Single value Not in sequence
More than 1 value First element in sequence
More than 1 value Last element in sequence
More than 1 value Middle element in sequence
More than 1 value Not in sequence

Input sequence (T) Key (Key) Output (Found, L)

17 17 true, 1
17 0 false, ??
17, 29, 21, 23 17 true, 1
41, 18, 9, 31, 30, 16, 45 45 true, 7
17, 18, 21, 23, 29, 41, 38 23 true, 4
21, 23, 29, 33, 38 25 false, ??

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 42

 Structural testing
● Sometime called white-box testing.
● Derivation of test cases according to
program structure. Knowledge of the
program is used to identify additional test
cases.
● Objective is to exercise all program
statements (not all path combinations).

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 43

 Structural testing

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 44

 Binary search - equiv. partitions
● Pre-conditions satisfied, key element in array.
● Pre-conditions satisfied, key element not in
array.
● Pre-conditions unsatisfied, key element in array.
● Pre-conditions unsatisfied, key element not in array.
● Input array has a single value.
● Input array has an even number of values.
● Input array has an odd number of values.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 45

 Binary search equiv. partitions

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 46

 Binary search - test cases

Input array (T) Key (Key) Output (Found, L)

17 17 true, 1
17 0 false, ??
17, 21, 23, 29 17 true, 1
9, 16, 18, 30, 31, 41, 45 45 true, 7
17, 18, 21, 23, 29, 38, 41 23 true, 4
17, 18, 21, 23, 29, 33, 38 21 true, 3
12, 18, 21, 23, 32 23 true, 4
21, 23, 29, 33, 38 25 false, ??

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 47

 Path testing
● The objective of path testing is to ensure that
the set of test cases is such that each path
through the program is executed at least
once.
● The starting point for path testing is a
program flow graph that shows nodes
representing program decisions and arcs
representing the flow of control.
● Statements with conditions are therefore
nodes in the flow graph.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 48

 Binary search flow graph

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 49

 Independent paths
● 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14
● 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 14
● 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 5, …
● 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 2, 11, 13, 5, …
● Test cases should be derived so that all of
these paths are executed
● A dynamic program analyser may be used to
check that paths have been executed

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 50

 Test automation
● Testing is an expensive process phase. Testing
workbenches provide a range of tools to reduce the
time required and total testing costs.
● Systems such as Junit support the automatic
execution of tests.
● Most testing workbenches are open systems
because testing needs are organisation-specific.
● They are sometimes difficult to integrate with closed
design and analysis workbenches.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 51

 A testing workbench

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 52

 Testing workbench adaptation
● Scripts may be developed for user interface
simulators and patterns for test data
generators.
● Test outputs may have to be prepared
manually for comparison.
● Special-purpose file comparators may be
developed.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 53

 Key points
● Testing can show the presence of faults in a system;
it cannot prove there are no remaining faults.
● Component developers are responsible for
component testing; system testing is the
responsibility of a separate team.
● Integration testing is testing increments of the
system; release testing involves testing a system to
be released to a customer.
● Use experience and guidelines to design test cases
in defect testing.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 54

 Key points
● Interface testing is designed to discover defects in
the interfaces of composite components.
● Equivalence partitioning is a way of discovering test
cases - all cases in a partition should behave in the
same way.
● Structural analysis relies on analysing a program
and deriving tests from this analysis.
● Test automation reduces testing costs by supporting
the test process with a range of software tools.

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 55