Software Testing: An Overview

The main goal of this chapter is to introduce common terminology and concepts on software testing that is assumed as background in this book. The chapter also presents the multidimensional nature of software testing, showing its different variants and levels of application. After a brief introduction, Section 2 presents a set of basic definitions used in the remaining of this book. Section 3 gives an overview of the essential activities and documents involved in most test processes. Section 4 discusses the kinds of properties we may want to test, including functional, non-functional, and structural properties. In Section 5, we discuss the various dimensions of software testing, covering unit, integration, system, and acceptance testing. Section 6 highlights that different domains have demanded effort from the research community to work on tailored strategies; we discuss object-oriented, component-based, product-line, and reactive-systems testing. Test selection is a main activity of a test process, and we discuss the main strategies in Section 7. We conclude this introduction in Section 8 with some final considerations.