1.

Your organization has been successful in developing a client-server application that is

installed at several customer locations. You are changing the application to be a hosted, webbased application that anyone can use after a simple registration process. Outline some of the
challenges that you should expect from a quality and testing perspective of the changed
application.
2. You are to write a program that adds two two-digit integers. Can you test this program
exhaustively? If so, how many test cases are required? Assuming that each test case can be
executed and analyzed in one second, how long would it take for you to run all the tests?
3. The number of defects left in a program is proportional to the number of defects detected.
Give reasons why this statement looks counterintuitive. Also, give practical reasons why this
phenomenon causes problems in testing.
4. Which of the following products would you say is of "high quality," based on the criteria
for quality control and quality assurance. Justify your answer.
a. Three successive versions of the product had respectively 0, 79, and 21 defects reported.
b. Three successive versions of the product had respectively 85, 90, and 79 defects reported.
5. Construct the flow graph for the expressions A AND B and A XOR B using simple
predicates alone. [Composite predicates are not allowed].
6. Write a simple matrix multiplication program and try to take care of as many valid and
invalid conditions as possible. Identify what test data would you see for testing program.
Justify your answer.
7. A re-entrant code is a piece of program that does not modify itself. In contrast, a non-reentrant code is a piece of program that modifies itself. Discuss the problems you will face
from the white box testing perspective and from the point of view of ongoing maintenance of
such a program.
8. Discuss the negative effect of the following constructs from a white box testing
perspective:
a. GOTO statements.
b. Global variables.
9. Consider the example of deleting an element from a linked list. What are the boundary
value conditions for that example? Identify test data to test at and around boundary values.
10. A web-based application can be deployed on the following environments:
a. OS(Windows and Linux)
b. Web server(IIS 5.0 and Apache)
c. Database(Oracle, SQL Server)
d. Browser( IE 6.0 and Firefox)
How much configurations would you have to test if you were to exhaustively test all the
combinations? What criteria would you use to prune the above list?
11. A product usually associated with different types of documentation-installation document
(for installing the product), administration document, user guide, etc. What would be the skill

set required to test these different types of documents? Who would be best equipped to do
each of these testing?
12. Consider a typical university academic information system. Identify the typical agents,
actors and the expected system behaviour for the various types of use cases in this system.
13. Consider a product which evolves is versions, each version taking approximately six
months to release to the market. When would you initiate each type of defect bash for a
version? Clearly state the assumptions you made while making that decision.
14. Give examples to show case where integration testing can be taken as a white box
approach (i.e., with access to code) and to show case where it can be taken as a black box
approach (i.e., no access to code).
15. Which category of system testing applies to each of the following cases? Justify your
answer.
a. A customer has given his transaction load and throughput requirements. You are to
recommend an appropriate hardware and software configuration for the customer.
b. Your product is a web-based product with a highly seasonal usage. You wan to
understand the product behaviour and performance even at loads much more than the
maximum expected usage so as to prepare for future expansion.
c. Your product is expected to run continuously and never stop functioning.
d. You have bought special reporting software that runs on top of an Oracle database.
Recently Oracle came up with a new version and the reporting software should be tested to
work with this new version.
e. You are to measure and publish performance characteristics of your product.
16. Classify the following as functional and non-functional testing and justify the answers.
a. Testing of documentation of the product to match the product behaviour
b. Verification that a payroll system satisfies local tax laws
c. Testing of the screens for user friendliness
d. Performance qualification of a product
e. Ensuring a certain percentage of code coverage for a product
17. Which of the following are "product level tests cases" as explained in the text? If not,
identify which level it belongs. Justify the reason for both the cases.
a. This text is to ensure that the customizations made on top of an ERP package which
in turn runs on a particular version of a database are working correctly.
b. In a payroll system, tests are done only for the tax calculation module.
c. In a database package, there are options to specify different sort algorithms. The
correct behaviour of each of these algorithms has to be verified.
18. Consider a revolutionary, path-breaking product that comes about which opens up
completely new methods of usage that the users are not used to. How would you characterize
"acceptance testing" in such a case? What are some of the challenges do you foresee in such
acceptance testing? How would you overcome such challenges?
19. You are advising a customer, "based on the tests conducted, the memory should be
doubled and the network bandwidth has to be quadrupled." What kind of objective data
would you give to substantiate your recommendation? If the customer asks you to justify

your answer in a tabular or graphical form, stating all your assumptions, how would you go
about?
20. Your initial tests indicated that a product went through a spike in CPU usage, but in
general otherwise, the CPU usage was below average. What tests would you do to further
narrow down and identify the cause for the spike?
21. In the Internet space, we talk of e-services", wherein, there are different "services"
registered on the net(like travel service, hostel, booking services, etc.). Consider the testing
challenges of putting together a "bigger" service composed of these atomic services. For
example, consider putting together a comprehensive travel booking that uses airline booking
from (the existing) travel services and from (the existing) hotel booking service. What kind of
testing challenges should you expect when you put together and use such composite services?
Consider all phases/types of testing, given that a user who buys your comprehensive service
may hold you responsible for the end-to-end functionality.
22. Consider a piece of embedded software that is part of a consumer gadget like a TV.
Which of the types of system testing discussed in this chapter would you perform and at what
times? What extra challenges would you foresee vis a vis say testing a conventional financial
application or a system software product like a database or operating system?
23. In each of the following cases, which performance factor is likely to be most important?
Justify your answers.
a. All the transactions in a bank should be processed by end of each day and by that
evening the end of day cash reconciliation should be done.
b. The users coming in to a bank should have their transaction completed in under 5
minutes.
c. Users are accessing in a remote file system from a client that has no processing
power and are typing a file name. Since the processing is done at the remote file server, every
character typed in is sent to the server and returned back.
24. Each product has different tuning parameters. For each of the following case, identify the
important tuning parameters, which documents/sources would you go through to find out the
parameters?
a. Operating system(e.g., Windows XP)
b. Database (e.g., Oracle)
c. A network card (e.g., a Wireless LAN card)
25. How are collecting requirements for performance testing different from say collecting
requirements for functional testing like black box testing? Distinguish by the sources used,
methods used, tools used and skill set requires
26. Most product types in software like databases, networks, etc have standard performance
benchmarks. For example, TPCB benchmark characterizes the transaction rates. Look up the
Internet and prepare a consolidated report on the industry standard benchmarks for the
various types of database transactions, compilers and other types of software that is of
interest to you.
27. There are a number of performance test automation tools available in the market. For your
organization, prepare a checklist of what you would expect from a performance test

automation tool. Using this checklist, make a comparison of the various possible automation
tools.
28. "Staffing people for performance testing is arguably the most difficult"- Justify this
statement based on the skill sets, attitude and other parameters.
29. We discussed way of prioritizing testcases. Using the suggestion given in the text,
prioritize the test cases as P0/P1/P2. Justify your answers.
a. A test cases for a network product that tests basic flow control and error control.
b. A test case for a database software that tests all the options of a join query.
c. A test case for a file system that checks allocation of space that is not contiguous.
d. A test case that tests the start up of an application in a "safe mode," something that
is not done very often.
f. A test case corresponding to a feature that has undergone significant change in the
current version.
g. A test case corresponding to a stable feature that has not uncovered any major
defects.
30. If during regression run, you are hard pressed for time, discuss the pros and cons of the
various methodologies of regress(regress all, regress changes,etc).
31. The idea of not decoupling data and algorithm was given as a key differentiator between
algorithm centric systems and object centric systems. What special challenges does this
approach present from a testing perspective?