The Art of Software Testing, Second Edition

Chapter 4. Test-Case Design

Moving beyond the psychological issues discussed in Chapter 2, the most important consideration in program testing is the design and creation of effective test cases.

Testing, however creative and seemingly complete, cannot guarantee the absence of all errors. Test-case design is so important because complete testing is impossible; a test of any program must be necessarily incomplete. The obvious strategy, then, is to try to make tests as complete as possible.

Given constraints on time and cost, the key issue of testing becomes

What subset of all possible test cases has the highest probability of detecting the most errors?

The study of test-case-design methodologies supplies answers to this question.

In general, the least effective methodology of all is random-input testing—the process of testing a program by selecting, at random, some subset of all possible input values. In terms of the likelihood of detecting the most errors, a randomly selected collection of test cases has little chance of being an optimal, or close to optimal, subset. In this chapter we want to develop a set of thought processes that let you select test data more intelligently.

Chapter 2 showed that exhaustive black-box and white-box testing are, in general, impossible, but suggested that a reasonable testing strategy might be elements of both. This is the strategy developed in this chapter. You can develop a reasonably rigorous test by using certain black-box-oriented test-case-design ...