COMPARATIVE STUDY ON NUMBER OF TEST CASES USING DIFFERENT SOFTWARE TECHNIQUES

Software development growth has been stupendous over the last few decades. Software testing which is aimed at reducing errors, cutting maintenance and overall software costs - has also been keeping pace. The core purpose of software testing is aimed at enhancing software quality. Testing typically consumes 40–50% of development efforts and exacts very high effort from systems that require higher levels of reliability. Hence, the importance of software testing as a part of software engineering cannot be undermined. One of the major problems within software testing area is generating a suitable set of cases to test a software system. The set should be generated in such a way so that it assures maximum effectiveness with the least possible number of test cases. There are numerous testing techniques available for generating test cases broadly grouped under White Box and Black Box techniques. This paper gives a comparative study on number of test cases using two White Box techniques (Basis Path testing; Graph Matrix) and two Black Box techniques (Worst Case Analysis; Boundary Value Analysis). The objective of the paper is to use the study of these representative techniques to highlight the future implications for several areas of both industry and academia. As a representation of the way, the industry can use these techniques in ways so far unthought-of, primary sales data collected from a primary survey by students as a part of a Live Project conducted by Wipro Consumer Care has been used. Black Box testing has been used to show how the numbers can be inputted into a system. It is to be noted that the results can easily be extrapolated and scaled to huge sets of data as well.