Test vector

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title: "Test vector" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["computer-engineering", "test-items"] topic_path: "engineering" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_vector" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

In computer science and engineering, a test vector is a set of inputs provided to a system in order to test that system. In software development, test vectors are a methodology of software testing and software verification and validation.

Rationale

In computer science and engineering, a system acts as a computable function. An example of a specific function could be y = f(x) where y is the output of the system and x is the input; however, most systems' inputs are not one-dimensional. When the inputs are multi-dimensional, we could say that the system takes the form y = f(x_1, x_2, ...) ; however, we can generalize this equation to a general form Y = C(X) where Y is the result of the system's execution, C belongs to the set of computable functions, and X is an input vector. While testing the system, various test vectors must be used to examine the system's behavior with differing inputs.

Example

For example, consider a login page with two input fields: a username field and a password field. In that case, the login system can be described as:

y = L(u,p)

with y \in { true , false } and u,p \in { String }, with true designating login successful, and false designating login failure, respectively.

Making things more generic, we can suggest that the function L takes input as a 2-dimensional vector and outputs a one-dimensional vector (scalar). This can be written in the following way:-

Y = L(X)

with X = [ x_1, x_2 ]=[u,p] ; ; ; Y = [ y_1 ]

In this case, X is called the input vector, and Y is called the output vector.

In order to test the login page, it is necessary to pass some sample input vectors {X_1, X_2, X_3, ...}. In this context X_i is called a test vector.

Alternatively, the concatenation of X and Y, e.g., [ x_1, x_2, y_1 ], can be called a test vector.

References

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