Domain Testing: Divide and Conquer - Testing Education

Howden (1976) defined a path this way: “A path through a program
corresponds to some possible flow of control” (p. 209).
Kaner et al. (1999) defined a path as “…a sequence of operations that runs
from the start of the program to an exit point. This is also called an end-to-end path.
A subpath is a sequence of statements from one place in the program to another.
Subpaths are also called paths” (p. 43).
Path Condition: IEEE Std. 610.12 (1990) defined the path condition as “A set of
conditions that must be met in order for a particular program path to be executed”
(p. 55).
Path Analysis: This has been defined by IEEE Std. 610.12 (1990) as “Analysis of
a computer program to identify all possible paths through the program, to detect
incomplete paths, or to discover portions of the program that are not on any path”
(p.55).
In the path analysis approach to doing domain testing, partitioning of the
input domain is done based on paths. To understand what is meant by path in this
context, consider an example of a very simple program:
If x < 10 then
Else
Event A occurs
Event B occurs.
Depending on what the value of the variable x is, the program would either
go down the path that leads to the execution of event A or would go down the path
that leads to the execution of event B.
In the path analysis approach to doing partition testing, the input domain
corresponding to a program would be the set of all paths that the program can take.
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