The Secret of Structured Testing

March 09 10:37 2016 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

The employees of software testing company always perform thorough checking of system or application. Various testing types, for example, automated testing and manual testing, help to reach this goal.

Besides well-known software testing types such as performance testing, load testing, usability testing, security testing, etc., there are additional ones that make the process of test case creation faster and easier. Structured testing is closely connected with control flow testing.

Structured testing is sometimes called basis path testing. This technique is based on the work of Tom McCabe. He defines structured checking as the analysis of the graph topology using Cyclomatic Complexity (C). C equals the number of edges (arrows on graph) minus the number of nodes (bubbles) plus two. According to this formula, the minimal number of basis paths can be defined.

What Are the Steps of Structured Testing?

The control flow graph should be selected from the system module.
The Cyclomatic Complexity of graph should be counted.
A set of C basis path should be selected.
It is necessary to create test cases for every basis path.
The execution of created test cases.

The formula for computing Cyclomatic Complexity can be simplified if all decisions are binary. The testing procedure based on the basis paths (C test cases) ensures the branch and statement coverage.