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Unlike physical systems, most of the defects in software are design errors. Read about the important purpose of software testing and differentiate between verification and validation and basic software testing terms. Compare and contrast the use of various testing strategies, including black-box, white-box, top-down, and bottom-up.
Test Techniques
Selecting and combining techniques
Functional and structural
Specification-based and code-based test techniques are often contrasted as functional vs. structural testing. These two approaches to test selection are not to be seen as alternative but rather as complementary; in fact, they use different sources of information and have proved to highlight different kinds of problems. They could be used in combination, depending on budgetary considerations.
Deterministic vs. random
Test cases can be selected in a deterministic way, according to one of the various techniques listed, or randomly drawn from some distribution of inputs, such as is usually done in reliability testing. Several analytical and empirical comparisons have been conducted to analyze the conditions that make one approach more effective than the other.