Software testing techniques

BANGALORE, INDIA: For an IT organization, developing a software system that meets the business needs of clients, is always a challenge. The company needs to ensure that the software system that gets delivered to their clients is free from bugs or defects and achieves the demands as per client requirements. But this can only be ensured by following rigorous software testing and quality assurance procedures.

Software testing is a process without which the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) stands incomplete. It is the process that identifies the correctness, completeness and quality of the software developed during the SDLC process. Software bugs and improperly tested codes cost millions in damages and millions more in time and money to fix the defect. Organizations try to develop software applications that should act in a way that cause the least amount of surprises to the user. In short they should be bug free. New paradigms of software testing are being adopted and used in the process of software development.

Due to this, the software testing field has emerged from the shadows in the world IT space and has claimed its rightful place in the IT market. Gone are the days when software testing was considered a poor cousin of software development. Today the global software testing market is estimated to be USD 13 billion dollars. And according to IDC, almost USD 1 billion dollars of the global market size was accounted by Indian companies. In this article, we talk about software testing techniques, trends that are coming up in this arena and also new software development paradigms.

Software Testing Techniques

Software Testing is not just about error-finding and their rectification but also about underlining client requirements and testing that those requirements are met by the software solution/application. It is the most important functional phase in the SDLC as it exhibits all mistakes, flaws and errors in the developed software. Without rectifying theses errors, technically termed as ‘bugs,’ software development is not considered to be complete. Hence, software testing becomes an important parameter for assuring quality of the software product.

The ways in which testing can be done are broadly classified as Manual Testing and Automated Testing. Though these methods of software testing can be further branched out in various types of software testing techniques such as White box testing, Black box testing, Integration testing, Unit testing, Sanity testing, Functional testing, System testing, Load testing, etc, depending on the given set of requirements and cases.

The manual testing of the software happens in several phases. Self-testing, which is done by developers themselves or by small development teams, should be restricted to build cycle itself and should be done while the software development is in the production stage. The software testing process gets initiated from the beginning of the project, where the aspects of the data provided by the clients are examined by developers and programmers to find out the flaws and issues. They also contribute by providing their views on how to enhance the quality of the software.

The manual testing process is time as well as resource consuming. They require a team of dedicated testers to perform manual testing procedures. Owing to the size and complexity of the software applications being developed today, manual testing doesn’t seem to be a viable option for an enterprise. Automation allows the testing procedure to be executed by software testing tools rather than humans, thus eliminating the ‘human-error factor.’ Testing process automation results in faster execution and also helps the organization in reducing the cost incurred in the process.

The Automated Testing process allows an organization to perform consistent and replicated tests of application software over different platforms. This results in getting the feedback on how a software application would perform when executed on different platforms. Today applications are designed to be platform independent and this process can help in ensuring that. Moreover, organizations apply rigorous testing on all software development projects. And through Automated Testing processes, organizations can ensure that the software system developed is reliable and built as per specifications, and would support business processes of the client.

Best Practices

As organizations adopt more and more testing techniques for ensuring better and reliable software delivery, they are also in quest of searching the best practices to suit their testing requirements. These practices can be summed up in three categories: basic, foundational, and incremental.

Basic practices involve having the functional specifications which describe the external conditions that would trigger or execute a software service. The advantage of having functional specification is that the test-generation activity could simultaneously happen during the process of code development. Another important practice is during the functional testing when the variations are designed on which the test cases will be based upon. Combining with multi-platform and internal beta testing, the basic practices for software testing are covered up.

Foundational practice refers to the user Scenarios, usability testing, testing for requirements, and automated testing on the software. While user scenarios are based on the various functionalities of the software, they are advantageous as they test the software product on the lines in which a customer will use them. The major role of software testing is to meet the client’s requirements. While the Incremental practice involves usage of techniques which are finer in details and provide specific advantages in some given scenarios.

These practices include teaming up testers with developers, as this will help reduce the time when code travels between the teams. Now testers simultaneously test the code that developers have developed. This loose coupling of testers with developers results in better design of use-cases and better code development. In all, employing these practices along with software-testing techniques can help an organization to bring code reliability and better performance.