Motivation
Much software testing is merely hopeful, seeking to exercise the software system in various ways to see whether any faults can be detected. Testing may indeed reveal some faults, but can never guarantee that the system is correct, once testing is over. Functional testing methods seek to improve on this situation, by developing a formal specification describing the intended behaviour of the system, against which the implementation is later tested (a kind of conformance testing). The specification can be validated against the user-requirements and later proven to be consistent and complete by mathematical reasoning (eliminating any logical design flaws). Complete functional testing methods exploit the specification systematically, generating test-sets which exercise the implemented software system exhaustively, to determine whether it conforms to the specification. In particular:
- Full positive testing: confirms that all desired behaviour is present in the system;
- Full negative testing: confirms that no unintended behaviour is present in the system.
This level of testing can be difficult to achieve, since software systems are extremely complex, with hundreds of thousands of states and millions of transitions. What is needed is a way of breaking down the specification and testing problem into parts which can be addressed separately.
Read more about this topic: X-Machine Testing
Famous quotes containing the word motivation:
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—June Jordan (b. 1939)