Structural Software Testing

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Structural Software Testing

In this article, I am going to discuss Structural Software Testing. Please read our previous article, where we discussed Accessibility Software Testing. At the end of this article, you will understand the following essential pointers related to Structural Software Testing.

1. What is Structural Software Testing?
2. Explain Types of Structural Testing
3. Explain Structure Testing Tools
4. What are the Advantages of Structure Software Testing?
5. What are the Disadvantages of Structure Software Testing?

What is Structural Software Testing?

Structural testing is a type of software testing that makes use of the product’s internal design. Put another way; structural testing refers to software testing carried out by a team familiar with the software development process. Structural testing incorporates members of the development team in the testing team because it is primarily concerned with the internal design and execution of the product. It evaluates various software features by their categories. The exact opposite of behavioral testing is structural testing.

White-box, glass-box, and clear-box testing are other terms for structural testing. Developers mostly use it to find problems rapidly and repair them. Unlike functional testing, structural testing necessitates a thorough understanding of the programming language. The test engineer must understand the internal workings of the code and how the software is built to conduct structural testing. The test engineer plans how the program operates throughout the structural testing, and it can be employed at all testing levels. For instance, the system’s structural element or acceptability testing could cover menu selections or essential business processes.

Explain Types of Structural Testing

Four categories of structural testing exist:

1. Control Flow Testing: Control flow testing is a sort of structural testing that uses the program’s control flow as a model. The entire software’s code, design, and structure must be known for this kind of testing. Developers frequently use this testing to check their code and implementation. The logic of the code is tested using this technique to ensure that the desired outcome is reached.
2. Data Flow Testing: Using the control flow graph, it investigates the irrational outcomes that can occur to data. The relationships between values and variables provide the foundation for detecting data flow irregularities. Usage of variables not initialized. Variables that are initialized are not utilized once.
3. Slice-Based Testing: Weiser and Gallagher first suggested slice-based testing for software maintenance. It is helpful for software maintenance, functional cohesion measurement, and program comprehension. It separates the program into many slices and tests each piece, significantly impacting the complete software.
4. Mutation Testing: Mutation testing is a sort of software testing that is used to both create new software tests and assess the quality of those that already exist. Modifying a program slightly is linked to mutation testing. The emphasis is on aiding the tester in developing practical tests or locating gaps in the test data used to create the program.

Explain Structure Testing Tools

Like other types of testing have their own tools, structural testing has a few useful open-source and paid tools. The following are some of the most used instruments for structural testing:

Cucumber:

It provides a readily understandable testing script for system acceptance and automated testing, so it is a widely used tool for behavior-driven development. It is a software tool that the test engineer uses to create test cases for analyzing the behavior of the software.

Jbehave:

It is a BDD (behavior-driven development) framework. TDD (test-driven development) and acceptance-test-driven design have evolved into BDD. It is intended to make these techniques more natural and open to amateurs and experts.

Aspects of JBehave

The following are some of the JBehave features that are often used:

• It only uses the Java programming language for execution, which works well with Java-based businesses.
• In this, user stories can be written using JBehave or Gherkin syntax.
• JUnit can be used to implement the user stories.
• It offers class specifications for the steps and annotation-based configuration.
• It enables the use of Ant tasks to execute tales.

Cfix:

Cfix, an XUnit testing framework supported by the C/C++ programming language, is another structural testing tool. The unit tests are compiled and linked into a DLL in this tool. It was created to function nicely with Windows Debuggers like Visual Studio and WinDBG.

Cfix’s distinctive traits

The following are some of Cfix’s most popular features:

• Both user-mode and kernel-mode unit testing are supported.
• In the event of implementation, the failed test scenario can be significantly modified.

JUnit:

One of the critical resources for structural testing is JUnit. It was created as an open-source, Java-based unit testing framework. It will enable us to increase developer productivity, ensure development code consistency and reduce debugging time.

What are the Advantages of Structure Software Testing?

The following are some advantages of structural testing:

• Since structural testing is an automated procedure, little physical labor is needed.
• The method of structural testing doesn’t take much time.
• The early flaws can all be easily found.
• It makes it simple to delete dead code (excessive code) or statements.
• It offers simple implementation and code.
• It provides thorough software testing.

What are the Disadvantages of Structure Software Testing?

The following are the structural testing’s shortcomings:

• An in-depth understanding of programming languages is needed to carry out structural testing.
• Although structural testing is automatic, it may prove to be highly challenging because it requires training in the testing instrument.
• It is costly in terms of money since, occasionally, resources are required to carry out structural testing effectively.
• Additionally, there is a little possibility that some commands, statements, or branches may be mistakenly overlooked.

In the next article, I am going to discuss Volume Software Testing. Here, in this article, I try to explain Structural Software Testing. I hope you enjoy this Structural Software Testing article.