subject: Software Testing Methods [print this page] Any good software testing services is partly intuitive, but largely methodical. A software testing team follows the steps of software testing life cycle and helps in delivering software project that correct, complete, secure and with quality desired. Software testing practices is not a standalone activity. It is highly dependent on development activity and thus both development phase and testing activities draws heavily from each other. Testing of the software being developed starts with the initial stage of software coding. This enables the quality software tester team to set up the testing environment and configuration that will be required for the delivery of bug free project. Both the development and testing team involved in the design and development of software product or service communicate and understand the problems and concerns that might hamper the success of the project.
Software testing is largely divided into Black-box testing and White-box testing services. Both these services cater to two different aspects of testing. While the Black-box testing refers to external view of text object the White-box testing is an internal view of the item in discussion. In fact White-box testing and Black-box testing are terms associated with point of view a test case is designed by a tester. Let us discuss the major types of White-box testing that is available and used by testers.
Unit testing is an item that falls under White-box testing services. This type of testing deals the code as a whole. Unit testing tests the interaction of many functions but confine the test within one unit. This software testing method can be said as the one of the corner stones of Extreme Programming (XP). The software testing team carries out unit testing in order to check the fine working of the particular module or unit of code. This is a very basic type of testing as it can be carried out when a particular functionality is developed. Another type of White-box testing is static and dynamic analysis. When the testing team goes through the developed code in order to find out any possible defect in it is refereed as static analysis. In case dynamic analysis, the developed code is executed and the output obtained is analyzed. There is another item known as branch testing that looks into the testing of branch codes. This testing makes sure that no branching leads to abnormal behavior of the application. Then there is statement testing that actually executes the code in such a way that each statement gets executed at least once.
