Let's Talk About Software Testing

So, What is it?

Software Testing is a process to evaluate the functionality of a software application, with an intent to find whether the developed software met the specified requirements or not, and to produce a bug free quality product.?

?Why do we Test Software??

• Cost of fixing the bug is larger if testing is not done in early stage?
• To produce good quality product?
• To make software application defect free?
• To check if behaviour of application is same in development and production environment?

How much testing is enough??

• Selecting test conditions to cover the fundamental problem of testing.?
• Number of test cases is infinite even for the simplest systems.?
• Instead of trying all the possible test cases, the goal of testing is to focus on the tests that give us the greatest value by covering the most important parts of the system.?
• We could say sufficient coverage is done when we are able to balance the project constraints such as time and the budget.?

What are the key activities in Software Testing??

• Test Planning — Establishing the scope, approach, intent, specific tasks in the intended test activities.?
• Test Control — Taking corrective actions to get a test project back on track in order to avoid further deviation from the project schedule.?
• Test Analysis — Identifying what to test (component or functionality), choosing the test conditions we need to cover.?
• Test Design — Determining how to test what we decided in the Test Analysis phase, we do this by transforming test cases to make it more generalized covering different conditions within its scope.?
• Test Implementation — Carrying out the remaining activities that are required to begin the test execution, such as developing and prioritising test procedures, test data generation and setting-up the test environment.?
• Test Execution — In this we run our tests against test objects.?
• Checking results — As a part of test execution, we see actual results with respect to our test cases. We need to compare the outcomes with expected outcome to grade the test condition as pass/fail.?
• Evaluating Exit Criteria — At a high level, exit criteria are a set of conditions that would allow some part of a process to complete. Exit criteria are fixed at the time of test planning.?
• Test Result Reporting — In test result reporting, we want to report our progress against exit criteria, as described above.?
• Test Closure — Involves collecting test process data obtained from various test process activities.?

What are the Principles of Testing?

There are seven fundamental principles of testing observed over the past 40 years:?

Principle 1: Testing shows presence of defect but cannot prove there are no defects.?

Principle 2: Exhaustive Testing is impossible, testing everything is not feasible. Instead of exhaustive testing, risk analysis and priorities should be used to focus the efforts.?

Principle 3: Early Testing reduces the cost and workload exponentially, hence testing activities should be started as soon as possible in the software development life cycle.?

Principle 4: Defect Clustering — testing effort should be focused proportionally to the expected and later observed defect density in the modules. A small number of modules usually contain most of the defects.?

Principle 5: Pesticide Paradox — if the same set of test cases are run over and over again, eventually the same test cases will no longer find any new defects. To overcome this, new and revised test cases should be used after each cycle.?

Principle 6: Testing is context dependent, testing is done differently in different contexts. For example, safety-critical software is tested differently for a net-banking website.?

Principle 7: Absence of errors fallacy — finding and fixing defects doesn’t help if the system built is unusable and doesn’t fulfil the user's needs and expectations.

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