I am writing in response to the blog post/tutorial at https://www.guru99.com/domain-testing.html titled “What is Domain Testing in Software Testing? (with Example)”. It goes into some detail describing what domain testing is, which is a topic that we have already seen in the CS 443 Software Quality Assurance and Testing class. Domain testing is a type of functional testing, which is a quality assurance process for testing whether the functionality of a system is behaving properly by verifying that certain inputs correspond to the specified outputs.
One thing about the blog post I am not quite certain about is that it refers to domain testing as an important “white box testing method”, which seems inaccurate; the act of checking inputs against expected outputs is independent from the software’s inner workings. Feeding the program an input and checking that the output is correct is a black box testing approach. The clarity provided by a white box would however be necessary in defining the specification itself, methods such as boundary value testing or equivalence class testing require equivalence classes and boundaries to be identified, which would require access to the inner machinations of the software.
Equivalence class testing and boundary value testing are a primary focus of the blog post. Equivalence class testing partitions the set of possible inputs into subsets of inputs that have the same behavior, and boundary value testing tests the behavior given inputs at the boundaries of equivalence classes. The boundary values are particularly useful inputs to test because they are edge cases that are more likely to produce incorrect results compared to arbitrary values chosen within the boundary. If there is an off-by-one logical error then testing the boundaries is what will make it apparent.
I think that this blog post is a good summary of some of the testing methods we have learned about in our classroom activities. It does not go into as much detail or cover more specific varieties of testing such as weak and strong or robust boundary value testing, but it is a short and simple introduction to what domain testing in software testing is about.
From the blog CS@Worcester – klapointe blog by klapointe2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.