Walkthroughs in software testing

The code walkthrough, like the inspection, is a set of procedures and error-detection techniques for group code reading. It shares much in common with the inspection process, but the procedures are slightly different, and a different error-detection technique is employed.

The walkthrough is an uninterrupted meeting of one to two hours in duration. The walkthrough team consists of three to five people to play the role of moderator, secretary (a person who records all errors found), tester and programmer. It is suggested to have other participants like:

  1. A highly experienced programmer,
  2. A programming-language expert,
  3. A new programmer (to give a fresh, unbiased outlook)
  4. The person who will eventually maintain the program,
  5. Someone from different project and
  6. Someone from the same programming team as the programmer.

The initial procedure is identical to that of the inspection process: the participants are given the materials several days in advance to allow them to study the program. However, the procedure in the meeting is different. Rather than simply reading the program or using error checklists, the participants “play computer”.

The person designated as the tester comes to the meeting armed with a small set of paper test cases-representative sets of inputs (and expected outputs) for the program or module. During the meeting, each test case is mentally executed. That is, the test data are walked through the logic of the program. The state of the program (i.e. the values of the variables) is monitored on paper or a blackboard.

The test case must be simple and few in number, because people execute programs at a rate that is very slow compared to machines. In most walkthroughs, more errors are found during the process of questioning the programmer than are found directly by the test cases themselves.

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