Structural Testing Istrct

Structural testing istrct

What is Structural Testing?

In structural testing technique, the software unit is seen as a glass box or white box because the software testers are required to possess the knowledge of the implementation as well as the execution of the software. In other words, structural technique is structure-based technique. It is the testing of program's implementation. Structural testing's intent is to exercise various data structures and programming structures used in the program rather than testing all the various output and input conditions. For instance, structural testing can be concerned with exercising loops in the program. Various cases can be derived to exercise the loops once, twice or several more times. This is typically carried out irrespective of the functionality of the program. The selection of test cases is based on software unit's implementation. The purpose behind selection of such cases is to bring about the execution of particular spots in the software unit, such as program branches, specific statements, paths and so forth. The likely results are assessed on a set of coverage criteria. Examples of coverage criteria include branch coverage, path coverage, and data-flow coverage. Structural testing lays emphasis on software entity's internal structure (Luo, n.d.).

Structural techniques can be implemented at various levels of testing. Program developers use structural testing in component integration testing and component testing, especially when tool support for code coverage is good. This technique is also used is system and acceptance testing. However, in such testing, the structures are different. For instance, the coverage of major business transactions or menu options can be the structural elements in such type of testing.

Types of Structural Testing

Path Testing

Path testing is a type of structural testing technique (Agarwal et.al, 2010). It involves utilization of the source code of a software program in order to make efforts to determine every possible path which is executable. The scheme behind this technique is that it makes the tester capable of testing every individual path in as many ways as possible. The testing of several paths in a number of ways maximizes the coverage of every test case. This provides the program tester best possible chances of determining various faults within a program code. The ability to use program's source code for testing purposes means that there exists a basis on which test cases can be defined in a precise manner. This enables for both the test cases and their outcomes to be analyzed mathematically. This leads to a more accurate measurement of faults and results. The two most common forms of path testing include DD-path and basis path testing.

DD-Path

DD-path stands for decision-to-decision path. DD-path is a testing technique that is based on program graphs (Gregory, n.d.). DD-path is used to create a condensation graph of a piece of program graph of software, in which several constructs are collapsed into single nodes that are called DD-paths. DD-paths are a combination or chains of several nodes in a directed graph which have certain defined specifications. Every chain can be divided into a ...