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 testing and components
 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.
Testing policies
 Exhaustive system testing where every possible
program execution sequence is tested, 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.
 Test-driven development
 Test-driven development (TDD) is an approach to
program development in which you 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 process
 TDD process activities
 Start by identifying the increment of functionality that
is required. This should normally be small and
implementable in a few lines of code.
 Write a test for this functionality and implement this
as an automated test.
 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.
 Implement the functionality and re-run the test.
 Once all tests run successfully, you move on to
implementing the next chunk of functionality.
Benefits of test-driven development
 Code coverage
 Every code segment that you write has at least one
associated test so all code written has at least one test.
 Regression testing
 A regression test suite is developed incrementally as a
program is developed.
 Simplified debugging
 When a test fails, it should be obvious where the problem
lies. The newly written code needs to be checked and
modified.
 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:
 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.
 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.
 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.
 A usage scenario for the MHC-PMS
Kate is a nurse who specializes in mental health care. One of her responsibilities
is to visit patients at home to check that their treatment is effective and that they
are not suffering from medication side -effects.
On a day for home visits, Kate logs into the MHC-PMS and uses it to print her
schedule of home visits for that day, along with summary information about the
patients to be visited. She requests that the records for these patients be
downloaded to her laptop. She is prompted for her key phrase to encrypt the
records on the laptop.
One of the patients that she visits is Jim, who is being treated with medication for
depression. Jim feels that the medication is helping him but believes that it has the
side -effect of keeping him awake at night. Kate looks up Jim’s record and is
prompted for her key phrase to decrypt the record. She checks the drug
prescribed and queries its side effects. Sleeplessness is a known side effect so
she notes the problem in Jim’s record and suggests that he visits the clinic to have
his medication changed. He agrees so Kate enters a prompt to call him when
she gets back to the clinic to make an appointment with a physician. She ends the
consultation and the system re-encrypts Jim’s record.
After, finishing her consultations, Kate returns to the clinic and uploads the
records of patients visited to the database. The system generates a call list for
Kate of those patients who she has to contact for follow-up information and make
clinic appointments.
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.
 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 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, and usability 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.
Stages in the acceptance testing
process
 Define acceptance criteria
 Plan acceptance testing
 Derive acceptance tests
 Run acceptance tests
 Negotiate test results
 Reject/accept system
 Stages in the acceptance testing process
The agreed This stage involves a
This involves deciding on
acceptance tests meeting between the
the resources, time, and
are executed on developers and the
budget for acceptance
the system. customer to decide on
testing and establishing a
whether or not the
testing schedule
system should be
accepted.

The acceptance Once acceptance the developer and

criteria should be criteria have been the customer
part of the system established, tests have to negotiate
contract and be have to be designed to decide if the
agreed between to check whether or system is good
the customer and not a system is enough to be put
the developer. acceptable. into use.
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
 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.