Evaluation of Modified Condition/Decision Coverage in Testing a Web Server

Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC) is a structural coverage criterion widely used in testing aviation software. Aviation software has a high level of state-based behavior, typically implemented with complex Boolean expressions. MC/DC was developed to provide the benefits of exhaustive testing of the Boolean expressions, without the overhead. Web servers are also state-based systems, and the purpose of this research is to determine whether the benefits of MC/DC also apply to these systems. In this paper, a unit-testing case-study on a typical web server Culture Object Management Web Server (COMWS) was performed to evaluate the effectiveness of MC/DC in this context. For each method in COMWS, Black-Box testing was carried out first, followed by MC/DC testing. The Black-Box testing was used as a control group for MC/DC testing. The comparison focuses on three criteria: Testing Cost, Faults Found and Program Coverage. Based on the experimental results and comparative evaluation, two main conclusions were obtained: MC/DC is an additional effective testing technique to complement Black-Box testing for testing web servers, and it provides extra test capability where some of the variables used in Boolean expression are not directly derived from the input parameters.

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

National University of Ireland Maynooth

Year dc:date.issued

2014

Author dc:creator

• Li, Nan

• Computer Science

Language dc:language

en