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216 Chapter 8 Software testing

Path testing

Path testing is a testing strategy that aims to exercise every independent execution path through a component
or program. If every independent path is executed, then all statements in the component must have been
executed at least once. All conditional statements are tested for both true and false cases. In an object-oriented
development process, path testing may be used when testing the methods associated with objects.
http://www.SoftwareEngineering-9.com/Web/Testing/PathTest.html

Whittaker’s book (2002) includes many examples of guidelines that can be used
in test case design. Some of the most general guidelines that he suggests are:

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.

As you gain experience with testing, you can develop your own guidelines about
how to choose effective test cases. I give more examples of testing guidelines in the
next section of this chapter.

8.1.3 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 compo-
nent interface behaves according to its specification. You can assume that unit tests
on the individual objects within the component have been completed.
Figure 8.7 illustrates the idea of component interface testing. Assume that compo-
nents A, B, and C have been integrated to create a larger component or subsystem.
The test cases are not applied to the individual components but rather to the interface
of the composite component created by combining these components. Interface errors
in the composite component may not be detectable by testing the individual objects
because these errors result from interactions between the objects in the component.
There are different types of interface between program components and, conse-
quently, different types of interface error that can occur:

1. Parameter interfaces These are interfaces in which data or sometimes function
references are passed from one component to another. Methods in an object
have a parameter interface.