Faq in software testing

Just like the development world has many concepts and methodologies for creating software, there are many ways to think about how to test and the field is changing all the time. Early in my career, it could be perceived as a slight or insult to call someone who worked in testing a tester; they preferred to be called QA or quality assurance professionals. Just a year or two ago, I attended a testing conference and I made the mistake of calling someone a QA person. They corrected me and said that tester was the preferred term.

When you do black-box testing, you are only concerned with inputs and outputs. Most testing is done in this fashion because it is largely unbiased.

Real white-box testing is when you understand some of the internals of the system and perhaps have access to the actual source code , which you use to inform your testing and what you target. With white-box testing , you have at least some idea of what is going on inside the software. Oftentimes, unit testing is called white-box testing, but I disagree.

Unit testing is not testing at all. Advantages Disadvantages Discovering of hidden bugs more efficiently Tester needs to have coding knowledge Code will be optimized Code access required Fast problem and bug spotting Focus on existing software, missing functionality may not be discovered. The basic idea of acceptance testing is that you have some tests which test the actual requirements or expectations of the customer, and other tests that run against the system as a whole.

This kind of testing could be testing the functionality of the system or it could be testing the usability or both. Automated testing is any testing in which the execution of the test and the verification of the results is automated. So, you might automate the testing of a web application by running scripts which open up a web page, input some data, push some buttons and then check for some results on a page.

You could also automate the testing of an API by writing scripts which call out to the API with various data and then check the results that are returned. More and more of testing is moving towards automated testing because manually running through test cases over and over again can be tedious, error-prone and costly—especially in an Agile environment where the same set of tests may need to be run every two weeks or so to verify nothing has broken.

This brings us to regression testing, which is basically testing done to verify that the system still works the way it did before. This is extremely important with Agile development methodologies where software is developed incrementally and there is a constant potential that adding new features could break existing ones. In fact, you could really make the argument that all automated tests are regression tests since the whole purpose of automating a test is so that it can be run multiple times.

Functional testing is another broad term used in the testing world to refer to testing activities where what is being tested is the actual functionality of the system. So, functional testing is the kind of testing where you are really concerned with the system doing what it is supposed to do from a functional perspective.

But, there is definitely some legitimacy to the idea of exploratory testing and perhaps I am a bit too harsh and judgmental.

The idea behind exploratory testing—when done correctly—is that you have some guidelines and a basic plan of which application areas you are going to test and ways you are going to test them. Then, you go about without actual test cases and explore the application, looking for things that might be wrong or behavior that is unexpected. Oftentimes, exploratory testing sessions are recorded, so that if an error is found, the problem can be reproduced by retracing the steps taken by the exploratory tester.

Different organizations are going to have very different ideas of how testing should be done and what process should be followed. So, again, like a large amount of what I said about testing, the idea here is not to be prescriptive or to perfectly model the perfect testing process, but rather to give you an idea of what the testing process is like in general and what it entails. These are all questions that are generally answered in the test plan, or if the test plan is not a formal document, the test planning for a project.

Next, the tests are usually designed at a high level based on the requirements or functionality of the system. At this stage, a tester might be coming up with a list of general test cases which will be run, what kinds of conditions will be tested, and coming up with what will be needed to perform the tests. In this article, we are going to review the main peculiarities of different testing activities in a software testing company. The principal questions about software testing are associated with the objects to be tested, prospects and opinions used in software testing, managing, and organization of software testing activities.

The basic types of objects being tested are software programs or program code. The latter is the main focus of software testing techniques and activities.

White-box structural testing checks the correctness of internal structures implementation and connections between them. With latest software applications becoming more complex, it is difficult to decide when testing should be stopped. However, there are some common factors that can help you decide when testing should be stopped. Good code is code that has no bugs, works well, is easily readable and can be maintained with ease.

Developers and testers usually follow varied theories, metrics and standards to ensure good code. With the help of pair programming, reviews and code analysis tools, software testers can check applications to check for programs and later enforce standards.

If the overall structure of the software program can be easily modified, understood and maintained, then it can be said that the software program has a good internal design.

The features of a good internal design also include status logging capabilities, correct functioning and error-handling capabilities. Good functional design refers to how the users of the software find the functionality of the design.

If the software program meets all the requirements of the end-user, then it means that the software has a good functional design. Most users may have little computer knowledge and may not read the user manual or online-help. In such cases, if the software has a good functional design, then users can use the software with ease.

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