Software Testing

Types of Software Testing

There are many different types of software tests, each with specific objectives and strategies:

  • Acceptance testing: Verifying whether the whole system works as intended.
  • Code review: Confirming that new and modified software is following an organization’s coding standards and adheres to its best practices.
  • Integration testing: Ensuring that software components or functions operate together.
  • Unit testing: Validating that each software unit runs as expected. A unit is the smallest testable component of an application.
  • Functional testing: Checking functions by emulating business scenarios, based on functional requirements. Black-box testing is a common way to verify functions.
  • Performance testing: Testing how the software runs under different workloads. Load testing, for example, is used to evaluate performance under real-life load conditions.
  • Regression testing: Checking whether new features break or degrade functionality. Sanity testing can be used to verify menus, functions, and commands at the surface level, when there is no time for a full regression test.
  • Security testing: Validating that your software is not open to hackers or other malicious types of vulnerabilities that might be exploited to deny access to your services or cause them to perform incorrectly.
  • Stress testing: Testing how much strain the system can take before it fails. Stress testing is considered to be a type of non-functional testing.
  • Usability testing: Validating how well a customer can use a system or web application to complete a task.

In each case, validating base requirements is a critical assessment. Just as important, exploratory testing helps a tester or testing team uncover hard-to-predict scenarios and situations that can lead to software errors.

Even a simple application can be subject to a large number and variety of tests. A test management plan helps to prioritize which types of testing provide the most value—given available time and resources. Testing effectiveness is optimized by running the fewest number of tests to find the largest number of defects.

Why Software Testing is Important

Few can argue against the need for quality control when developing software. Late delivery or software defects can damage a brand’s reputation, which leads to frustrated and lost customers. In extreme cases, a bug or defect can degrade interconnected systems or cause serious malfunctions.

Consider Nissan having to recall over 1 million cars due to a software defect in the airbag sensor detectors, or a software bug that caused the failure of a USD 1.2 billion military satellite launch. The numbers speak for themselves. Software failures in the US cost the economy USD 1.1 trillion in assets in 2016. What’s more, they impacted 4.4 billion customers.

Though testing itself costs money, companies can save millions per year in development and support if they have a good testing technique and QA processes in place. Early software testing uncovers problems before a product goes to market. The sooner development teams receive test feedback, the sooner they can address issues such as:

  • Architectural flaws
  • Poor design decisions
  • Invalid or incorrect functionality
  • Security vulnerabilities
  • Scalability issues

When development leaves ample room for testing, it improves software reliability and high-quality applications are delivered with few errors. A system that meets or even exceeds customer expectations leads to potentially more sales and greater market share.

Software Testing Tools

Software Testing tools are the tools that are used for the testing of software. Software testing tools are often used to assure firmness, thoroughness, and performance in testing software products. Unit testing and subsequent integration testing can be performed by software testing tools. These tools are used to fulfill all the requirements of planned testing activities. These tools also work as commercial software testing tools. The quality of the software is evaluated by software testers with the help of various testing tools.

Types of Testing Tools

Software testing is of two types, static testing, and dynamic testing. Also, the tools used during these testing are named accordingly on these testings. Testing tools can be categorized into two types which are as follows:

  1. Static Test Tools: Static test tools are used to work on the static testing processes. In the testing through these tools, the typical approach is taken. These tools do not test the real execution of the software. Certain input and output are not required in these tools. Static test tools consist of the following:
    • Flow analyzers: Flow analyzers provides flexibility in the data flow from input to output.
    • Path Tests: It finds the not used code and code with inconsistency in the software.
    • Coverage Analyzers: All rationale paths in the software are assured by the coverage analyzers.
    • Interface Analyzers: They check out the consequences of passing variables and data in the modules.
  2. Dynamic Test Tools: Dynamic testing process is performed by the dynamic test tools. These tools test the software with existing or current data. Dynamic test tools comprise the following:
    • Test driver: The test driver provides the input data to a module-under-test (MUT).
    • Test Beds: It displays source code along with the program under execution at the same time.
    • Emulators: Emulators provide the response facilities which are used to imitate parts of the system not yet developed.
    • Mutation Analyzers: They are used for testing the fault tolerance of the system by knowingly providing the errors in the code of the software.
Scroll to Top