When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn What Does Failure-Directed Testing Mean?
Failure-directed testing, also sometimes called heuristics testing, is a type of software testing that focuses on the most likely errors for a piece of software or a program. This type of testing tries to work more intelligently than blanket or standard testing in order to seek out bugs or glitches and fix them.
Techopedia Explains Failure-Directed Testing
Some types of failure-directed testing consist of black box testing, where instead of looking at the source code of a program, programmers run the program and see what happens. This is in contrast to white box testing, where testers look at the actual source code of a program to look for possible errors. However, certain types of black-box testing can focus test activities on the areas of a program where certain types of failure are more likely to happen. For example, if testers know that a particular piece of source data is complex or nebulous, they may focus failure-directed testing in that area in run-time tests. That means that there can also be an element of white-box testing in failure-directed testing. The basic idea of failure-directed testing is that developers should put special focus on areas of the code base where more can go wrong.
