A survey of software functional testing techniques

Abstract

The authors survey several technical articles in the area of software testing and provide a cross section of software functional testing techniques. In particular, they focus on the systematic methodologies because such methodologies demonstrate the absence of unwanted erroneous functions and divide the testing effort into manageable pieces for automating the testing effort into manageable pieces for automating the testing process. The authors also discuss the empirical approach to assessing software validation methods and focus on the static and the dynamic techniques used to characterize this approach. Several techniques were found to be very useful for discovering different types of errors. For instance, the symbolic evaluation can be used to prove the correctness of a program without executing it by symbolically evaluating the sequence of the assignment statements occurring in a program path. Structured walkthroughs and design inspections result in substantial improvements in quality and productivity through the use of formal inspections of the design and the code.<>