What is Negative testing?

Understanding Negative testing

This ensures the application can gracefully handle invalid input or unexpected user behavior. Negative testing also called failure testing involves deliberately providing invalid inputs unexpected sequences of actions or error conditions to verify that a system handles these scenarios appropriately without crashing corrupting data or creating security vulnerabilities. This approach is critical for identifying security flaws like input validation weaknesses. Negative testing is referenced in standards like OWASP ASVS ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 and secure development guidelines. Organizations implement negative testing through test case design that incorporates invalid inputs boundary conditions error states and malformed data as part of security testing programs. For example a web application security team might conduct negative testing by submitting special characters extremely long inputs SQL injection attempts and other malicious data to input fields to ensure the application properly validates rejects and logs these attempts without revealing sensitive information or allowing system compromise. Related terms Fuzz testing Error handling Input validation Boundary testing Security testing Robustness testing Exception handling.