Tools for Software Verification and Validation

Project CPSC 542 Summer-08 Ali Raza aliraza@csn.fullerton.edu Introduction Software systems are becoming more challenging to build day by day especially in the enterprise environment. High qualified staff ensures that software products are built on time, under budget, and are of the highest quality with respect to the attributes such reliability, correctness, usability and the ability to meet all user requirements [1]. For the quality outputs, we perform verification and validation (V&V) process during the software life cycle. ,[object Object],“Validation is the process of evaluating a software system or component during, or at the end of, the development cycle in order to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements.” [2] In other words, validation is a process where we determine whether the product satisfies the specified user requirements as well as quality attribute such as reliability, scalability, and performance etc during or at the end of the SDLC. ,[object Object],“Verification is the process of evaluating a software system or component to determine whether the products of a given development phase satisfy the conditions imposed at the start of that phase.”[2] In other words, verification is a process where we determine whether conditions imposed at the beginning of each phase are satisfied for instance does the code reflect conditions imposed by the design. Ever since complexity of the software systems have increased in an enterprise environment, it is very hard to release a successful product without using any V&V tools. If we research, we can see there are many tools available now for verification and validation of the software systems. This paper will discuss two tools for V&V such as NUnit and Mercury Quality Center (MQC) ,[object Object]

URLhttp://www.nunit.org/index.php ,[object Object]

Introduction:NUnit is a simple unit-testing framework for the.NET platform which was ported from JUnit framework initially. It is an open source product. We can download from NUnit website [4]. In SDLC, developers write unit test in order to test their modules and classes, and as a result they verify the code against the design of the software. ,[object Object],We can integrate the NUnit framework with visual studio and automate our unit testing process. NUnit supports all the visual studio project type such as C#, VB.NET, J# and C++. When tests are run for a Visual studio project, they run just as if the output assembly had been loaded with one exception. The default location for the config file is the directory containing the project file and its default name is the same as the project file with an extension of .config. For example, the following command would load the tests in the nunit.tests assembly using the configuration file. nunit.tests.dll.config located in the same directory as the dll. nunit.exe nunit.tests.dll On the other hand, the following command would load the tests using the configuration file nunit.tests.config located in the same directory as the csproj file. nunit.exe nunit.tests.csproj The same consideration applies to running tests using the console runner. [4] ,[object Object],This is an important feature of NUnit which provides a central unit testing framework to the .Net applications. NUnit gives a rich set of assertions as static method of the Assert classes [1]. Therefore, if assertions fail during the unit testing process then method doesn’t return and an error is reported. ,[object Object],In earlier version of NUnit, we used to identify tests based on inheritance and naming conventions. But later on, NUnit has used custom attributes for this purpose. NUnit Framework namespace contains all the NUnit attributes. Each source file that contains test must include a using statement for that namespace and the project must reference the framework assembly, nunit.framework.dll. [4] ,[object Object],We can run various versions of the .NET framework by using the configuration files. This will be helpful when developers need to know how the system would behavior in different CLRs. ,[object Object],NUnit allows loading suites of tests from multiple assemblies in both console and GUI. In any case a top level suite is constructed, which contains the root suite for each assembly. ,[object Object],As discussed above, NUnit is a product which will be used for unit testing. Unit Testing is a white box testing. White box testing starts at the method, functions and basic class level and progress through complex classes and sometime sub modules. In white box testing our focus will be on statements, branches, path, loops and data follows of the coding. NUnit tool facilities verification because we verify that the code reflects conditions imposed by the design phase. ,[object Object],NUnit will be used during the implementation phase (coding) of the software life cycle. And developers will ensure that code has written as per design. Because by writing the unit tests themselves they will head start towards the quality product and bug free code. ,[object Object],Unit testing is very useful technique for preventing the defects and NUnit is the perfect tool for .Net framework. I used NUnit way back when I worked on.Net technologies. I used to perform the unit testing before I handed over the code to SQA group, and if I make any changes to the code then I used to perform the regression testing to verify that everything working as expected. As a result SQA group find fewer defects which were mostly related to data issues. ,[object Object]

URLhttps://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-127-24^1131_4000_100__ ,[object Object]

IntroductionMercury Quality Center (MQC) is bought by HP. It is a web-based management tool which provides a centralized control over the entire testing project. MQC is used by the testers as well as managers. It provide an easy interface to manage and organize activities such as requirement coverage, management of test cases, detail reports after the execution of test cases, management of defect and test automation. [7] We can divide MQC in to two parts. One is for administrator tools called Site Administrator and another one is for user tools called Quality Center Bin. ,[object Object],It is the important part of the MQC and also the starting point. All the administrative tasks such as creating the project, assign resources or users to the project, creating specific role etc is done from this section. We can also configure other application such as WinRunner or Quality Test Professional (QTP). This section also used as mail servers, and for authentication. For instance we can configure MQC with active directory where user will login to MQC by using her/his windows network password and username. [7] ,[object Object],This part of MQC is related to the users who interact with the tool. Because it provides following functionality ,[object Object]

Running test cases automatically

Tools for Software Verification and Validation

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