A_Brief_Essay_on_Software_Testing
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A Brief Essay on Software Testing
Antonia Bertolino, Eda Marchetti
Abstract— Testing is an important and critical part of the software development process, on which the quality and reliability of the
delivered product strictly depend. Testing is not limited to the detection of “bugs” in the software, but also increases confidence in its
proper functioning and assists with the evaluation of functional and nonfunctional properties. Testing related activities encompass
the entire development process and may consume a large part of the effort required for producing software. In this chapter we
provide a comprehensive overview of software testing, from its definition to its organization, from test levels to test techniques, from
test execution to the analysis of test cases effectiveness. Emphasis is more on breadth than depth: due to the vastness of the topic,
in the attempt to be all-embracing, for each covered subject we can only provide a brief description and references useful for further
reading.
Index Terms — D.2.4 Software/Program Verification, D.2.5 Testing and Debugging.
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1. INTRODUCTION
esting is a crucial part of the software life cycle, and
recent trends in software engineering evidence the
importance of this activity all along the development
process. Testing activities have to start already at the re-
quirements specification stage, with ahead planning of test
strategies and procedures, and propagate down, with deri-
vation and refinement of test cases, all along the various
development steps since the code-level stage, at which the
test cases are eventually executed, and even after deploy-
ment, with logging and analysis of operational usage data
and customer’s reported failures.
Testing is a challenging activity that involves several high-
demanding tasks: at the forefront is the task of deriving an
adequate suite of test cases, according to a feasible and cost-
effective test selection technique. However, test selection is
just a starting point, and many other critical tasks face test
practitioners with technical and conceptual difficulties
(which are certainly under-represented in the literature):
the ability to launch the selected tests (in a controlled host
environment, or worse in the tight target environment of an
embedded system); deciding whether the test outcome is
acceptable or not (which is referred to as the test oracle
problem); if not, evaluating the impact of the failure and
finding its direct cause (the fault), and the indirect one (via
Root Cause Analysis); judging whether testing is sufficient
and can be stopped, which in turn would require having at
hand measures of the effectiveness of the tests: one by one,
each of these tasks presents tough challenges to testers, for
which their skill and expertise always remains of topmost
importance.
We provide here a short, yet comprehensive overview of
the testing discipline, spanning over test levels, test tech-
niques and test activities. In an attempt to cover all testing
related issues, we can only briefly expand on each argu-
ment, however plenty of references are also provided
throughout for further reading. The remainder of the chap-
ter is organized as follows: we present some basic concepts
in Section 2, and the different types of test (static and dy-
namic) with the objectives characterizing the testing activity
in Section 3. In Section 4 we focus on the test levels (unit,
integration and system test) and in Section 5 we present the
techniques used for test selection. Going on, test design,
execution, documentation,d management are described in
Sections 6, 7, 8 and 9, respectively. Test measurement issues
are discussed in Section 10 and finally the chapter conclu-
sions are drawn in Section 11.
2. TERMINOLOGY AND BASIC CONCEPTS
Before deepening into testing techniques, we provide here
some introductory notions relative to testing terminology
and basic concepts.
2.1 On the nature of the testing discipline
As we will see in the remainder of this chapter, there exist
many types of testing and many test strategies, however all
of them share a same ultimate purpose: increasing the
software engineer confidence in the proper functioning of
the software.
Towards this general goal, a piece of software can be tested
to achieve various more direct objectives, all meant in fact
to increase confidence, such as exposing potential design
flaws or deviations from user’s requirements, measuring
the operational reliability, evaluating the performance
characteristics, and so on (we further expand on test objec-
tives in Section 3.3); to serve each specific objective, differ-
ent techniques can be adopted.
Generally speaking, test techniques can be divided into two
classes:
• Static analysis techniques (expanded in Section 3.1),
where the term “static” does not refer to the techniques
themselves (they can use automated analysis tools), but
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• Antonia Bertolino is with the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie “A. Faedo”
Area della ricerca CRD di Pisa, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa Italy.
E-mail: antonia.bertolino@isti.cnr.it.
• Eda Marchetti is with the Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie “A. Faedo” Area
della ricerca CRD di Pisa, Via Moruzzi 1, 56124 Pisa Italy.
E-mail: eda.marchetti@isti.cnr.it.
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