What is behavior testing in software testing?

Software testing involves the use of various techniques and tools to evaluate a software program and determine its results and outputs through several use cases.

Behavior testing in software testing is an example of a technique we can use to validate certain behaviors of a software program instead of the technical perspective, under various circumstances.

Why should we perform behavior testing?

Behavior testing helps determine how the system must behave externally. It is also known as black box testing.

We perform behavior testing without knowing the internal contents of the application. It effectively knows how the system must respond when specific inputs are provided to the software under testing.

Error identification using behavior testing

With behavior testing, we analyze different types of errors, such as the ones demonstrated in the diagram below:

How to conduct behavior testing

Behavior testing involves various techniques and approaches:

1. Equivalence Class Partitioning (ECP): Using this technique, we divide the input data into valid and invalid values to check whether or not they exhibit the same behavior.

2. Boundary Value Analysis (BVA): In this technique, we set a boundary value lower or higher than the actual limit to check the behavior of our system in both conditions.

3. Decision Table Testing (DTT): This is a systematic technique that provides various input combinations and captures their system behavior in a tabular form.

4. State Transition Testing (STT): In STT, we check the overall flow of a particular module in our system. Does the expected result match the actual outcome?

5. Error Guessing Technique (EGT): EGT focuses on the tester’s experience. There is no specific set of rules to test the behavior of a system with this technique.