software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, basis path testing, or structured testing, is a white box method for designing

test case In software engineering, a test case is a specification of the inputs, execution conditions, testing procedure, and expected results that define a single test to be executed to achieve a particular software testing objective, such as to exercise ...

s. The method analyzes the

control-flow graph In computer science, a control-flow graph (CFG) is a representation, using graph notation, of all paths that might be traversed through a program during its execution. The control-flow graph was discovered by Frances E. Allen, who noted that ...

of a program to find a set of linearly independent paths of

execution Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the State (polity), state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to ...

. The method normally uses McCabe

cyclomatic complexity Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code. It was developed by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr. in 1976. ...

to determine the number of linearly independent paths and then generates test cases for each path thus obtained. Basis path testing guarantees complete branch coverage (all edges of the

), but achieves that without covering all possible paths of the control-flow graph the latter is usually too costly. Basis path testing has been widely used and studied.

See also

References

Further reading