Software testing

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

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

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

 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 3

 Testing phases

Component System
testing testing

Software developer Independent testing team

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

 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 5

 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 6

 The software testing process

Test Test Test Test

cases data results reports

Design test Prepare test Run program Compare results

cases data with test da
ta to test cases

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

 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 8

 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 9

 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 10

 Incremental integration testing

A T1

T1
A
T1 T2
A B
T2

T2 B T3

T3
B C
T3 T4
C
T4

D T5

Test sequence 1 Test sequence 2 Test sequence 3

©Ian Sommerville 2004 Software Engineering, 7th edition. Chapter 23 Slide 11

 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 12

 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 13

 Black-box testing
Inputs causing
anomalous
Input test data Ie behaviour

System

Outputs which reveal

the presence of
Output test esults
r Oe defects

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

 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 15

 System tests

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

 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 17

 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 18

 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 19

 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 20

 Interface testing
Test
cases

A B

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

 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 22

 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 23

 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 24

 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 25

 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 26

 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 27

 Equivalence partitioning

Invalid inputs Valid inputs

System

Outputs

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

 Equivalence partitions
3 11
4 7 10

Less than 4 Between 4 and 1

0 More than 10

Number of input values

9999 100000
10000 50000 99999

Less than 10000 Between 10000 and 99999 More than 99999

Input values

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

 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 30

 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 31

 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 32

 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 33

 Structural testing

Test data

Tests Derives

Component Test
code outputs

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

 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 35

 A testing workbench
Test data
Specification
generator

Source Test
Test data Oracle
code manager

Dynamic Program Test

Test results
analyser being tested predictions

Execution File
Simulator
report comparator

Report Test results

generator report

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

 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 37