4/18/2020 Basis path testing - Wikipedia

Basis path testing

In software engineering, basis path testing, or structured testing,[1] is a white box method for
designing test cases. The method analyzes the control flow graph of a program to find a set of linearly
independent paths of execution. The method normally uses McCabe' cyclomatic complexity to determine
the number of linearly independent paths and then generates test cases for each path thus obtained.[2]
Basis path testing guarantees complete branch coverage (all edges of the control flow graph), but
achieves that without covering all possible paths of the control flow graph—the latter is usually too
costly.[3] Basis path testing has been widely used and studied.[4]

See also
DD-path testing

References
1. Arthur H. Watson and Thomas J. McCabe (1996). "Structured Testing: A Testing Methodology Using
the Cyclomatic Complexity Metric" (http://www.mccabe.com/pdf/mccabe-nist235r.pdf) (PDF). NIST
Special Publication 500-235.
2. Linda Westfall (2008). The Certified Software Quality Engineer Handbook. ASQ Quality Press.
pp. 436–437. ISBN 978-0-87389-730-3.
3. Y.N. Srikant; Priti Shankar (2002). The Compiler Design Handbook: Optimizations and Machine
Code Generation. CRC Press. p. 249. ISBN 978-1-4200-4057-9.
4. Robert V. Binder (2000). Testing Object-oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools (https://archiv
e.org/details/testingobjectori00bind/page/378). Addison-Wesley Professional. p. 378 (https://archive.
org/details/testingobjectori00bind/page/378). ISBN 978-0-201-80938-1.

Further reading
Paul C. Jorgensen (2002). Software Testing: A Craftsman's Approach, Second Edition. CRC Press.
pp. 146–150. ISBN 978-0-8493-0809-3.
Alan Page; Ken Johnston; Bj Rollison (2008). How We Test Software at Microsoft. Microsoft Press.
chapter 6. ISBN 978-0-7356-3831-0.

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