Program Test Data

Program Test Data

When designing applications, one of the programmer’s most important responsibilities is to ensure the program functions the way it is intended to function. In order to ensure this functionality, the programmer must run a series of tests on their application to ensure maximum efficiency. If any anomalies arise in the testing, it can result in then the application freaking out and completely crashing or just not doing anything. In order to run these series or tests, the programmer must utilize a variety of test data. Utilizing the test data should reveal flaws in the program and enable the programmer to make the necessary adjustment to the program.

To examine these tests further, the following commentary shall compare the testing methods for the following programming languages: Visual Basic, Java, and C++. The different types of tests that we will utilize in ensuring the efficiency of the program are Limits or Range Testing, Max or Min Data Type Testing, and Logic or Selection Testing All Paths. Each test serves its own specific purpose and each of the three types of testing strategies test a different area of the designed program. This type of multi testing ensures the program will run at its optimal ability.

Limit/Range Testing and Max/Min Data Type Testing

In all three of these programming languages, the programmer must declare variables to validate the data that is entered into the application. For example, the application can prompt a user for an input of True or False and if the user supplies the number 100, then the application is probably going to freak out and not do what it is supposed to do. In this case, the data type for this input has to be set as a Boolean. A Boolean data type only accepts values equal to True or False. For numeric data types, the declaring of variable would provide the range of numbers that can be entered into the input. Each programming language has its own data types. Java has only three groups of data types, which are Numeric or Integer, Character, and Boolean. Visual Basic has 11 data types, which are Boolean, Byte, Currency, Date, Double, Integer, Long, Object, Single, String, and Variant. C++ has 9 data types, which are Bool, Char, Short, Int, Long, Long Long, Float, Double, and Long Double.

Logic Testing All Paths

Logical testing is a technique of testing software that tests internal structures or workings of an application, as opposed to its functionality. The three programming languages each have a number of ways to test the logical failures, but they all utilize an Integrated development environment or compiler. This means that the programmer will know of any logic errors as soon the syntax is evaluated in the integrated development environment or compiler.


This again proves that even though a programmer wants to release their great application to the world, it is imperative that they take the time to test all aspects of the program to ensure the end user gets what they pay for.