Chapter 5

Testing
Outline
 Development testing
 Release testing
 User testing
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.
An input-output model of program
testing
Verification vs validation
 Verification:
"Are we building the product right”.
 The software should conform to its specification.
 Validation:
"Are we building the right product”.
 The software should do what the user really requires.
Verification vs validation
Inspections and testing
Software inspections
 These involve people examining the source
representation with the aim of discovering anomalies
and defects.
 Inspections 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
 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.
 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.
 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
 Development testing: the system is tested during
development to discover bugs and defects.
 Release testing: a separate testing team test a
complete version of the system before it is released to
users.
 User testing: users or potential users of a system test
the system in their own environment.
Development testing
Development testing
 Development testing includes all testing activities that are
carried out by the team developing the system.
 Unit testing: individual program units or object classes are
tested. Unit testing should focus on testing the functionality
of objects or methods.
 Component testing: several individual units are integrated
to create composite components. Component testing should
focus on testing component interfaces.
 System testing: some or all of the components in a system
are integrated and the system is tested as a whole. 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:
 Individual functions or methods within an object
 Object classes with several attributes and methods
 Composite components with defined interfaces
used to access their functionality.
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.
The weather station object interface
Weather station testing
 Need to define test cases for all of the methods associated
with the object such as reportWeather and reportStatus.
Ideally, you should test methods in isolation, but, in some
cases, test sequences are necessary.
 Using a state model, identify sequences of state transitions
to be tested and the event sequences to cause these
transitions
 For example:
 Shutdown -> Running-> Shutdown
 Configuring-> Running-> Testing -> Transmitting ->
Running
 Running-> Collecting-> Running-> Summarizing ->
Transmitting -> Running
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 or otherwise of
the tests.
Automated test components
 A setup part: initialize the system with the test case,
namely the inputs and expected outputs.
 A call part: call the object or method to be tested.
 An assertion part: 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.
Choosing unit test cases
 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:
 The first of these should reflect normal operation of a
program and should show that the component works as
expected.
 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
 Partition testing: 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.
 Guideline-based testing: 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)
 For example, when you are testing programs with
sequences, arrays, or lists, guidelines that could help
reveal defects include:
 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
 Choose inputs that force the system to generate all error
messages
 Design inputs that cause input buffers to overflow
 Repeat the same input or series of inputs numerous times
 Force invalid outputs to be generated
 Force computation results to be 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.
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 behaviour 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 a separate
testing team 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
documents the components and interactions that are being
tested.
Collect weather data sequence chart
Test cases derived from sequence
diagram
 An input of a request for a report should have an
associated acknowledgement. A report should ultimately
be returned from the request.
 You should create summarized data that can be used to
check that the report is correctly organized.
 An input request for a report to WeatherStation results in a
summarized report being generated.
 Can be tested by creating raw data corresponding to the
summary that you have prepared for the test of SatComms
and checking that the WeatherStation object correctly
produces this summary. This raw data is also used to test the
WeatherData object.
Testing policies
 Exhaustive system testing is impossible so testing policies
which define the required system test coverage may be
developed.
 Examples of testing policies:
 All system functions that are accessed through menus
should be tested.
 Combinations of functions (e.g. text formatting) that are
accessed through the same menu must be tested.
 Where user input is provided, all functions must be tested
with both correct and incorrect input.
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
 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:
 A separate team that has not been involved in the system
development, should be responsible for release testing.
 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.
 Mentcare system 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.
Features tested by scenario
 Authentication by logging on to the system.
 Downloading and uploading of specified patient records to
a laptop.
 Home visit scheduling.
 Encryption and decryption of patient records on a mobile
device.
 Record retrieval and modification.
 Links with the drugs database that maintains side-effect
information.
 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
behaviour.
User testing
User testing
 User or customer testing is a stage in the testing
process in which users or customers provide input and
advice on system testing.
 User testing is essential, even when comprehensive
system and release testing have been carried out.
 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
 Alpha testing
 Users of the software work with the development team to
test the software at the developer’s site.
 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.
 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
 Define acceptance criteria
 Plan acceptance testing
 Derive acceptance tests
 Run acceptance tests
 Negotiate test results
 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.
Key points
 Testing can only show the presence of errors in a
program. It cannot demonstrate that there are no
remaining faults.
 Development testing is the responsibility of the
software development team. A separate team should
be responsible for testing a system before it is released
to customers.
 Development testing includes unit testing, in which
you test individual objects and methods component
testing in which you test related groups of objects and
system testing, in which you test partial or complete
systems.
Key points
 When testing software, you should try to ‘break’ the software
by using experience and guidelines to choose types of test case
that have been effective in discovering defects in other systems.
 Wherever possible, you should write automated tests. The tests
are embedded in a program that can be run every time a change
is made to a system.
 Test-first development is an approach to development where
tests are written before the code to be tested.
 Scenario testing involves inventing a typical usage scenario
and using this to derive test cases.
 Acceptance testing is a user testing process where the aim is to
decide if the software is good enough to be deployed and used
in its operational environment.