A survey of software functional testing methods

Abstract

Functional testing is used to find disagreement between the specifications and the actual implementation of the software systems. The method of representing the specification can help to detect inconsistency and incompleteness in it. The various specification representation schemes are outlined in the paper. The basic technique of functional testing of software systems is the black box technique. This technique generates the test data using the information contained in the program's specification, independent of the implemented program's code. Black box testing cannot discover errors contained in the functions which are not mentioned explicitly in the specification. Therefore, a program dependent testing is necessary to discover this type of errors. The paper surveys the different methods of generating test data for both techniques; the black box and the program dependent techniques.