SWEN 5431-01 Testing validation and verification Instructor: Dr.

James Helm Assignment - 2

Submitted by : Shivananda Reddy Malipatel 1165821

Exercise 1 Under the topic of Test Automation and Tools give the six examples of tools that may also be classified by Specialization?

The Software Testing Automation Framework is an open source, multi-platform, multi-language framework. It has been designed around the idea of reusable components, called services such as process invocation, resource management, logging, and monitoring. It removes the tedium of building an automation infrastructure, hence enables us to focus on building the automation solution. The Software Testing Automation Framework provides the foundation upon which to build higher level solutions, which provides an approach that is supported across a large variety of platforms and languages. The test automation has the following tools:

Record/Playback tools:
Record/playback tools combine the data acquisition with dynamic measurement. During the recording of the events the test data is acquired. During test execution, the data is used to record the test script which is used to evaluate the execution of the target-oftest. A recording tool generally uses a set of filters, which aggregates the recorded data into basic, readable primitive methods. The recording tool converts the aggregated data into playback code by converting the playback primitive methods into corresponding computer language instructions. Record and playback tools are designed to keep the customer fully dependent on them for all aspects of testing such as the test creation, execution, reporting. References: http://www.autotestguy.com/archives/2005/02/automated_testi_2.html

Quality metric tool:

Quality metrics measure how frequently a product meets the quality standards where the process output is in relation to the ideal quality standard. Quality metric tools helps improve the current quality level until it meets or exceeds the desired quality level. These tools are static measurement tools which perform a static analysis of the design model or source code to establish a set of parameters describing the target-of-test's quality. The quality metrics tool has been developed to determine the different types of design metrics and the quality attributes of Object Oriented program. These quality attributes generally determines the complexity and efficiency of the program. Reference: http://www.ehow.com/list_6877755_quality-metrics-tools.html http://www.ijcte.org/papers/230-G333.pdf

Coverage monitor tools:

Coverage monitor tools describes the degree to which the source code of a program that has been tested. It indicates the completeness of the testing by identifying how much of the target-of-test was covered, in some dimension, during testing. Typical classes of coverage include, requirements-based, logic branch or node , data state, and function points. Code coverage monitor tools runs in most frameworks in the following phases :

Instrumentation changes the byte code of a classes and it injects custom calls to the program Run of tests and collection of metrics reported by the injected custom calls processing of the entire metrics Reporting of results. References: http://www.rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Code+coverage+tools.

Test case generators:

Test case generators are tools mainly used to produce valuable test cases and data in order to test a given software. Since testing is complex, we cannot state a tool which serves exhaustively to every piece of software developed in each domain. They use either a formal specification of the target-of-test's data inputs or the design model(s) / source code to produce test data that tests the nominal inputs, error inputs, and limit and boundary cases. Test case generation by Specification based Software Testing. It generates the test cases based on the functional specification and requirements of the software. A potent set of test case is the set of all test cases which are liable to uncover faults. Such faults are called potent faults, and vaguely defined. Since there are no boundaries which defined a potent fault, it is difficult to generate test case for such uncovering faults. A test adequacy criteria is the one which is used to differentiate a good test set from a bad test set. Coverage tests are one in which each and every line of software or code is tested in order to find faults. Branch coverage test is one of the simple form of coverage test which tests only at the branches and conditions. Use case based test generators: An use case may be considered as a pictorial representation of any system that is based on UML -Unified Modeling Language specification. An use case gives the following for various people: i) Customer - What to expect? ii) Developer - What to code?

iii) Technical Writer - What to document? iv) Tester - What to test? A use case scenario is one which is obtained from the use cases which are there in hand. They are : a) Instance of an use-case. b) Complete path through use case. This use case scenario is used to generate test cases.

There are three steps to generate test case from use case: 1) From each use case generate a full set of scenario. 2) From each scenario, generate test cases and a condition that makes it to execute. 3) For each test case identify the data value to test. Test case generation by Specification based Software Testing This method generates test cases based on the functional specification and requirements of the software. Since this could be adopted from the first phase of the Software development life cycle, the amount of bugs in the software gets greatly reduced. There are some problems in transforming the functional specification. They are: i) It must be user friendly. ii) It must be in a position to be converted into a machine readable form. iii) Based on this we acquire a reasonably small set of test data input. In order to achieve this we use a tool called CAT - Computer Assisted Testing which is still under implementation and is not complete. The CAT uses TSG - Test Script Graph and TSL - Test Script Language to convert functional specification to cases. It also compiles a set of logic expressions and uses Boolean reduction algorithm to reduce those expressions to a minimal form. References: http://www.stylesen.org/test_case_generators.

Comparator Tools:
The test comparator is one of the most useful feature for seeing exactly what the error is in a test failure. It compare test results with reference results and identify the major differences. Comparators differ in their specificity to a particular data formats. comparators may be pixel-based or object-based . First you should run a test file or test suite. Then select one of the test failures. This should show the expected and actual results in the test

report. We use it in Testing Phase. It allows objects to be sorted and provides other useful functions for further comparison. References: http://freshmeat.net/projects/comparator-tools http://www.geekinterview.com/question_details/80841.

Data Extractors:
It provide inputs from existing sources such as databases and as well as the source code. It provide inputs for test cases from existing sources such as databases, data streams in a communication system, reports, or design model / source code. These tools are basically designed to do a whole load of data mining such as obtaining information from the telnet protocol as well as all third party applications of the various platforms like UNIX. The developers of these tools also design toolkits in which the firms in the market can work with quite easily thereby reducing the cost of having to contract outside help for their data extraction needs. These toolkits are made up of comprehensive libraries. Reference: http://www.mozenda.com/data-extraction-software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load