Tag Archives: Black-box testing

Code and Test Coverage

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When moving from the traditional waterfall process with manual testing towards BDD with automated execution of scenarios, one of the often asked questions is “how do you measure your test coverage?”. What it really wants to say is “we have high test coverage with manual testing, can you guarantee the same or more with the BDD?”. From there on usually comes the suggestion to transfer one-to-one manual tests to the BDD format. That’s not a good idea since the result would be less than adequate transformation to the different format without any tangible change. BDD is not only about automation but about the way we construct and deliver software.

Code Coverage Analysis

Main usages of code coverage analysis is to:

  • Find areas of software under test that were not exercised by a set of test cases.
  • Help in creation of additional test cases to increase the coverage.
  • Provide quantitative measure of test coverage as indirect measure of quality.
  • Identify redundant test cases that do not increase coverage
  • Identify parts of the code that is not in use

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Black-box vs White-box Testing

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Testing shows the presence, not the absence of bugs. Edsger W. Dijkstra

Two common types of testing are black-box and white-box testing. Both can drive or be driven by development.

Black-box testing

medium_6326549196Black-box testing (also known as functional testing) treats software under test as a black-box without knowing its internals. Tests are using software interfaces and trying to ensure that they work as expected. As long as functionality of interfaces remains unchanged, tests should pass even if internals are changed. Tester is aware of what the program should do but does not have the knowledge of how it does it. Black-box testing is most commonly used type of testing in traditional organizations that have testers as a separate department, especially when they are not proficient in coding and have difficulties to understand the code. It provides external perspective of the software under test.
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