A Beginner’s Guide to Software Testing
What Is Software Testing?
Software Testing is a method to check whether the software product matches expected requirements and to ensure that the software product is bug-free. It involves the execution of software/system components using manual or automated tools to evaluate one or more properties of interest.
What Are the Benefits of Software Testing?
Here are the benefits of using software testing:
Cost-Efficiency: It is one of the important advantages of software testing. Testing any IT project on time helps you to save your money in the long term. In case the bugs are caught in the earlier stage of software testing, it takes developers fewer resources to fix it.
Security: It is the vulnerable and sensitive benefits of software testing. People are looking for trusted products. It helps in removing risks and problems early on.
Product quality: Product quality represents your Standards and loyalty throughout the software.
Customer Satisfaction: The main motive of any product is to give satisfaction to the customers. UI/UX Testing ensures the best user experience.
Importance of Software Testing:
- To put it simply, the importance of software testing can be measured in the user’s response. It promises better business optimization (less maintenance cost), reliability, and superior user experience among other things. Subsequently, the iterative efforts spending to mold a powerful yet error-free software are far and wide.
- Despite the involvement of designers and developers, software testers play a decisive role in the process. As the development process follows the software development life cycle, the testing process lines up right behind the queue to compile the units to verify and validate.
- Altogether, it is a continuous process of verification and validation to deliver an excellent product. Every test determines the performance and efficiency of the system/application. Subsequently, it assists with guaranteeing whether the software application lines up with all the technical and business boundaries.
- By successfully passing through the diversified levels of testing, the final products are able to perform beyond the expected outcomes. At each level, the testers can not only figure out the errors but also learn how to prevent such snags in the future. Besides, exploring each mistake makes an Improvised version of the software.
Introduction to Software Testing Principles:
The following principles should be followed during software testing:
1. Testing Shows Presence of Defects:
Testing indicates the presence of a fault in the software. The goal of testing is to make the software produce an error or anomaly. Sufficient testing reduces the presence of bugs. In any case, testers are unable to find issues after repeated regression testing doesn’t mean that the software is bug-free.
Testing talks about the presence of defects and doesn’t talk about the absence of defects.
2. Exhaustive Testing is Impossible:?
What is Exhaustive Testing?
Testing all the functionalities using all valid and invalid inputs and preconditions is understood as Exhaustive testing.
3. Early Testing:
Defects detected in the early testing of SDLC are less expensive to fix. Conducting early testing reduces the cost of fixing errors.
Assume if we gathered incorrect requirements and developed the software it’s a waste of time, effort and money. So it’s better to analyze the requirement instead of later.
4. Defect Clustering:
Defect Clustering in software testing means that a small module or minor functionality contains most of the bugs or it has the most operational failures.
According to the Pareto Principle (80-20 Rule), 80% of issues originate from 20% of modules and the excess 20% of issues from the leftover 80% of modules. That’s why we do emphasize testing on the 20% of modules where we face 80% of bugs.
5. Pesticide Paradox:
The same test cases process repeat again and again until they do not find new bugs that are called Pesticide Paradox. So to overcome this, it is necessary to review the test cases regularly and add or update them to find more defects.
6. Testing is Context Dependent:
The testing approach depends on the context of the software we develop. For example, an online banking application requires a different approach to testing compared to an e-commerce site.
7. Absence of Error – Fallacy:
The Bug-free software can be a failure until it doesn’t match with the requirements or the right problems. it can be possible that bug-free software can be unused or fail in the long term if it doesn’t really meet the requirements.
