STRUCTURAL TESTING


Structural Testing | Software Testing Tutorial | Minigranth

Structural Testing : Introduction

  • The structure of a software product is responsible for designing test cases in order to test a software product.Since, the whole structure is known as structural testing, it is also known as white box testing.
  • Structural testing is more technical than functional testing as it attempts to design test cases from the source code and not from the specifications.
  • The major structural testing approaches are:
    1. Statement Coverage: In this, the aim is to achieve 100% statement coverage i.e. each and every statement of program is executed.
    2. Branch Coverage: In this, the aim is to achieve 100% branch coverage i.e. every branch either containing “true” or “false” conditions needs to be executed.
    3. Path Coverage: This technique corresponds to test all possible paths i.e. it is a combination of branch and statement coverage techniques. 

Structural Testing : Types

  • Structural testing can broadly be classified into four types. These are:
This image describes the various types of structural testing that can be performed according to the need on a software product in software testing.
Structural Testing : Types

  1. Control Flow testing
    • In this, various paths of programs and  various test cases are designed to execute those paths which ultimately results in finding out the cyclomatic complexity of the programs.
  2. Data Flow Testing
    • It is a technique used for determining improper use of data inside a software programs.
    • Incorrect variable declaration, Multiple times declaration and assigning values to variables can be some of the examples.
  3. Slice Based Testing
    • Slicing a software program and testing those slices individually for defects and errors.
  4. Mutation Testing
    • When small changes are made in some certain statements of source code to check whether the test cases are able to find the errors or not.
    • These changes are known as mutants.
    • The changes are very small such that they does not affect the overall objective of the program.
    • The goal of mutation testing is to assess the quality of test cases which should be powerful enough to fail the mutants in the code.

Structural Testing : Cyclomatic Complexity

  • The concept of cyclomatic complexity is used to find the number of independent paths present in a program graph.
  • There are three methods to calculate cyclomatic complexity. These are

If,

V(g) = Cyclomatic complexity.

n = Number of nodes.

e = Number of edges.

then,

  1. V(g) = e-n+2

  2. V(g) = Number of regions in the program graph.

  3. V(g) = Number of predicate node + 1.

where, predicate node is the node with 2 outgoing edges.