An Approach to Test Case Design for Cost Effective Software Testing

Software testing is the critical component of the software development life cycle. Cost of software testing would affect the cost benefit trade-off of a development organization. Any reduction in the cost of software testing would help to deliver the product to the customer at less cost. The existing research is to find the ways to reduce the testing cost. In this paper, an approach to test case design which reduces software testing cost in black box environment has been proposed. This type of approach has not been used earlier. The proposed approach reduces the total number of test cases in black box environment. This reduced test case set covers total functionality and ensures the quality of the product. The proposed approach is applied on four case studies and found that the reduction in testing cost is ranging between 27 and 36 percent. Hence, by using the proposed approach the software testing cost can be reduced considerably.