Process Cycle Test

August 17, 2016

What is Process Cycle Test?

A process cycle test is a black box test design technique, which is used to design test cases, suitable for the execution of business scenario and process. The basis of these tests is not the design of the software application but its structure, i.e. these tests are not meant for testing the design, rather it tests the structural flow of a system. Test basis is the structural detail of the system, to assess its behaviour and working, in the form of flowchart depicting multiple decision points and paths.

The primary purpose of using the process cycle test is to evaluate the suitability trait of the system with the organization and the automated information system. It generally focuses on the coverage of paths: test depth level 2.

Procedure of process cycle test

The complete procedure of the process cycle test may be understood through following given steps:

• Identifying test situations:
In this step, process diagram of the system is drawn, consisting of multiple decision points and paths. Here, all test situations needs to be identified with respect to the path coverage. All the possible combination of these paths gives the number of test situations.

• Creating logical test cases:

After identifying all test situations, the second step comes into action, which involves the creation of the logical test cases. It mainly consists of activities:

• Creating the set of logical test cases, and
• Thereafter defining and describing the subsequent steps of action for each logical test case.

However a test case may be designed using two approaches. In the first approach all the identified test situations are covered through the test cases, where each test case is based on a particular possible path from 'starting' point to 'end' point of the process and similarly all the possible path combinations are covered through the logical test cases and no combination is left out.

And in the second approach, list of path combination is used and initial path combination, from the 'start' point is taken up and then subsequent path combination is traced from where the initial path combination ends. The process of tracing the subsequent path continues until the 'end' point reaches.

• Creating physical test cases:
Since the logical test cases have been created, they are being formulated and implemented to create physical test cases. The test cases needs to be executed manually by the testers and is being followed by the last two steps as given below.
• Establishing the starting point.


• Creating and integrating the test script:
Generally, no need of this step arises, as physical test cases have almost covered the all possible scenarios.








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