Once an application has been developed, the developers must demonstrate that it performs the tasks for which it was designed accurately, reliably and with adequate performance. For this to be fulfilled extensive testing must be carried out and tools have been built to assist with this process. Developers have built different types of tool for addressing different aspects of the same general problem. The importance of proper testing to detect as many errors as feasibly possible has been driven by the increase of malicious or criminal intent on the part of developers that produce applications with functions that facilitate fraud or other criminal activity (an especial risk to the financial industry). This problem has been addressed by European Community Legislation, increasing the onus on software developers to show that they took all reasonable steps to ensure an application was free of defects and suitable for the purpose for which it was developed. Failure to do so could leave the developer liable to be sued by anyone have has incurred a loss in any business as a result of software collapse. The main types of tool that have resulted as a partial resu

Tools that analyse source code without executing test cases, but in deriving test cases for the software to be tested. There are three different types used in industry that are described below:

Test management tools are used to control and co-ordinate testing for each of the major testing steps. Tools in this category manage and co-ordinate regression testing, perform comparisons that ascertain differences between actual and expected output and conduct batch testing of programs with interactive human-computer interfaces. In addition to the functions noted above, many test management tools also serve as generic test drivers. A test driver reads one or more test cases from a testing file, formats the test data to conform to the needs of the software under test, and then invokes the software to be tested.

Systems can be difficult to test because several parallel operations are being carried out concurrently, which is especially true for real-time systems. Therefore it is difficult to anticipate the conditions and generate representative test conditions. However, dynamic test tools can capture a state of events during the execution of a program and so are often called program monitors, because they watch and report the behaviour of the program. The functions of the monitor are to list the number of times a submodule is called or a line of code is executed. These statistics tell testers if the test cases have statement coverage. Another function is to report on whether a decision point has branched in all directions, providing information about branch coverage. System performance information is also provided, including statistics about particular variables e.g. their first value, last value, minimum and maximum values. Breakpoints can be defined for the system, so when a variable attains or exceeds a specific value, the test tool reports the occurrence. Some tools will stop when breakpoints are reached so that the tester can examine the contents of memory or specific data items, as it is possible to change values as the test progresses. Any information captured during the test can be used to provide information about control flow. Another automated tool, analysers, are similar to monitors, except that they can also evaluate captured data to prescribed criteria. A test coverage analyser records the number of each statement executed during a test step and notifies us if certain routines or statements are not executed. A timing analyser works with predefined areas or memory or code and tracks the amount of time spent in each area as system functions are performed. This type of tracking can be useful during performance testing when timing requirements are checked.

Somerville, Ian. Software Engineering, fifth edition. Addison-Wesley 1996.

Specialised testing languages enable a software engineer to write detailed

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