Identifying Test Cases for Stored Procedure Using Cyclomatic Complexity Approach

Testing is very important but expensive and time consuming process in software development. Software quality enhancement can be achieved through the use of a systematic program testing methodology. Few testing methodologies were discussed in this paper such as cyclomatic complexity, specification-based testing, and structural-based automatic program testing. This paper complements a research on cyclomatic complexity approach in determining the number of test cases that are necessary to achieve thorough test coverage of a particular Oracle stored procedures. Cyclomatic complexity which was developed by Thomas J.
McCabe Sr. in 1976 is used to measure the complexity of a program. It directly measures the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code. The goal of this study is to identify the minimum number of test cases required or a given stored procedure, and cyclomatic complexity was chosen as an approach to achieve this goal. It was discussed thoroughly in chapter 3 of this paper, and testing of this approach was explained in chapter 4. It was found that the higher cyclomatic complexity measure indicates the higher complexity of a program and is more complex to maintain.