A Comparison of Structural Testing Strategies Based on Subdomain Testing and Random Testing

Both partition testing and random testing methods are commonly followed practice towards selection of test cases. For partition testing, the program’s input domain is divided into subsets, called subdomains, and one or more representatives from each subdomain are selected to test the program. In random testing test cases are selected from the entire program’s input domain randomly. The main aim of the paper is to compare the fault-detecting ability of partition testing and random testing methods. The results of comparing the effectiveness of partition testing and random testing may be surprising to many people. Even when partition testing is better than random testing at finding faults, the difference in effectiveness is marginal. Using some effectiveness metrics for testing and some partitioning schemes this paper investigates formal conditions for partition testing to be better than random testing and vice versa.