Software Testing

Software testing can be termed as the system of performing a program or application with the purpose of ascertaining the software bugs. It can also be described as the method of authenticating and determining that a software program or application or product achieves the business and technical benchmarks that that brought about the design and development of the software works as expected.

Software testing can be broken down into the following:

1.) Process: Software testing is a process and not just a single activity.

2.) All Life Cycle Activities: Testing is a procedure that happens throughout the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). The procedure of blueprinting tests ahead of time in the life cycle can aid to thwart bugs from getting initiated in the code. This is also referred to as, “verifying the test basis via the test design”. The test basis consists of documents like requirements and design specifications.

3.) Static Testing: This can test and find out the defects without running the code. Static Testing is run during the process of verification, which includes analyzing of the documents, which includes the source code), and static analysis. This is a very useful and also cost effective manner of testing. Examples of static testing are reviewing, walkthrough, inspection, etc.

4.) Dynamic Testing:  In this, the software code is run to present the outcome of running tests. Dynamic testing is run at the time of the validation process. Examples of dynamic testing are unit testing, integration testing, system testing, etc.

5.)  Planning:  Proper planning has to be done as to what is to be accomplished. In this, the test activities are controlled, testing progress reported, and software status under testing environment.

6.)  Preparation:  Proper preparation has to be made as to what testing will be done by choosing the right test conditions and designing test cases.

7.)  Evaluation:  During the evaluation, the results need to be checked the software evaluated under the testing and the completion criteria, which assists in deciding as to whether the testing has been completed and if the software product has cleared all the tests.

8.)  Software and related work products:  Along with the code testing, requirement testing and design stipulations and related documents like operation, user, training material, etc., is important equally.

Why is software testing necessary?

Software testing is genuinely needed to bring out the defects and errors that were committed at the time of the development phase. This is needed as it makes sure of customer’s authenticity and satisfaction with the application that is developed. It is very critical to make assure the product’s quality.  Delivering the customers a quality product will definitely help in winning their assurance. Testing is an important requirement so as to be able to furnish the facilities to customers like handing over a software application of a high quality product which would need less maintenance cost and therefore result in a more correct, uniform, and dependable results. Testing is needed for an efficient functioning of the software application or product. It is important to make sure that the application does not lead into any breakdown as it can be very costly in the future and in the following stages of development.

When do defects in software testing arise?

Some of the reasons due to which software defects arise are:

1.) The personnel who use the software application may not have the much needed knowledge of the product.

2.) The possibility of the wrong way of using the software that would lead to the defect and the failure.

3.) Incorrect code put in by the software developers and also due to the errors present in the design.

4.) Wrong arrangement of the environment that is needed for the testing.

What are the principles of testing?

Principles of Testing:

1.) Testing brings out the defects if there are any: Testing can only depict the presence of defects, but it cannot prove if there are any defects or not. Even after thoroughly testing the software application and product, it would be hard to say that the is 100% defect free. In many ways, testing can only bring down the number of defects that are not discovered in the software.  Absence of errors is not the proof or the correctness of the software and the product.

2.) In-depth testing is not possible: Testing all the things that include all the combinations of the inputs and the preconditions is not at all possible. Therefore, rather than working on in-depth testing the risks and priorities can be used to center on the testing efforts.

3.) Early testing of the Product: In the software development growth, the process of testing must being as soon as possible and must be concentrated on fixed objectives.

4.) Defect clustering: It is during pre-release testing that there are a number of modules that contain most of the defects that are detected and also this is when most operational failures are shown.

5.) Pesticide paradox: Repeating the same test time and again will eventually lead to the same chain of the test cases and there will no longer be any new bugs to be found. In order to get back this “Pesticide Paradox”, it is extremely significant to assess the test cases at regular intervals; therefore, new and out of the ordinary tests would have to be written in order to discharge the different portions of the software or system to possibly discover more defects.

6.) Testing is dependent on the context: Testing is mainly based on the. Different tests are conducted on different sites. For instance, safety–critical software is tried out in a different way than that of an e-commerce site.

7) The fallacy of absence – of – errors: If the system that has bene developed has become unusable and is not able to meet he needs of the user and their expectation, then locating and correcting the defects would not help.

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