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How to use automation for testing application involving highly complex calculations?

I want to following things for testing a application involving complex calculations:

  1. How to use test automation tools for testing calculations?(using automation tools like QTP or open source tools)
  2. How to decide coverage while testing calculations, how to design test cases?

Thanks in advance, Testmann

Solution

  • We had to test some really complex calculations in an application we built. To do this we used a tool call FitNesse, which is a wiki test harness (and open source too). It works really well when you provide it data in a table style format.

    We had some code in C# that perform some VERY complex calculations. So what we did is wrote a test harness in FitNesse, and then we supplied it with a lot of test data. We worked very hard to cover all cases, so we utilized a sort of internal truth-table to ensure we were getting every possible combination of data input.

    The FitNesse test harness has been invaluable to us as the complexity of the calculations has changed over time due to changing requirements. We've been able to ensure the correctness of the calculations because our FitNesse tests act as a very nice regression suite.