Software Testing

Software Testing Introduction

Software Testing Introduction

Testing is the essential part of any software development process or any kind of development of product or services. We’ll cover all the topics related to software testing in this tutorial like software testing techniques, types of testing and more. After this tutorial you’ll be able to have complete knowledge or information about Software Testing and its related terms. This tutorial is developed for beginners on this topic and the professionals who need to know about Software Testing for their professional development. 

Testing is the process of checking the product or the software for any loopholes or any faults. Testing is very important task that can be done multiple times while creating a product or after the product creation such that there should be no bugs in the software product before the delivery to the client. Testing is compulsory for delivering quality products that doesn’t contain or should contain very less faults in it. It can never be true that a software is complete bug free. So, continuous testing should be done even after the delivery of the software product.

  • What is Software Testing?

Software Testing is the testing in which we evaluate the software product for any faults or bugs so that it can be delivered to the customer or the organization bug-free. Software Testing should be done while developing the software and after development as well. 

The bugs found in software testing should be fixed at the time when they are encountered. But it should be kept in mind that fixing a bug can introduce other or more bugs in the software or the program. That’s why continuous checking of the software should be done until there are very less bugs which are not affecting the working of the software. In IT industry, software testing is widely used because of its importance as it provides a better software product before deployment. 

  • Why Software Testing and What are its types?

Software Testing is compulsory because the bugs are removed in the

development stage of the software. The bugs are not good in any software product because they can harm the hardware or can produce false results. If any software is not doing its job according to its functioning, then the software will be of no use. That’s why Software Testing is very important for any organization or any software developer to deliver its products containing no faults or very less bugs.

Types of Software Testing: Software Testing is of two types basically which are -    

1. Manual Testing and 

2. Automation. 

As the name suggests Manual testing is the testing done manually by software developers, or the team of testers which is hard to achieve and time consuming.

Automation testing is the testing of the software by using another software whose purpose is just to test the developed software for any bugs or faults using the test cases provided to the testing software. 

We’ll briefly look into types of software testing and its sub types in this tutorial. Each software testing type has its own importance and features. So, this tutorial is going to be very important for beginners and professionals.

  • Applications of Software Testing

Software Testing is widely used in IT industry for testing the software

products developed for better quality of the software. Various applications of Software Testing are as follows:

Quality Test: Software testing is used for testing the quality of the product. The quality of any software can be determined by the working of the software and the working of the software is dependent if there are any bugs present in the software or not. The bugs affect the working of the software and degrade the quality of the software product. That’s why software testing is used for testing the quality of the software product.

Functioning Test: Software Testing provides a greater importance in checking the functionality of the software. After the development of the software but before the deployment, the functioning should be tested if it is working properly as required or not and this can only be done by testing the software. 

For Enhancing the Product: Software Testing is used to check if how can we enhance the working of the software and overall user experience of the software. We need to test the software as a user to identify what changes can be made for more effectiveness of the software and how user experience to the software can be enhanced. Software testing can also help us for further software developments.

Cost Effective Software Development: Continuous Testing of the software helps us to save both time and cost because bugs encountered after the complete development of the software will increase more efforts and time for removing them which will result in more cost as well. Therefore, software testing should be started from the very first step to save time, cost and efforts.

Automation Testing: Automation testing reduces the time of testing the software because the testing software will automatically evaluate the software. But for using Automation testing, we have to complete our software development process, because the automation testing consists of test cases which are sometimes only applicable after the complete development of the software.

  • Is Software Testing a hard task?

Software testing is not much hard, but not that easy too. For software testing, we need to create test cases related to that software. And for creating test cases, we must have the knowledge about the working of the software, how the results are desired to be and what are the inputs. The manual testing can be called hard because in manual testing, we have to test all the cases one by one manually, but automation testing is also not easy too, because we have to create test cases for the testing application which is also a hard job and requires efforts.

Software testing might seem hard to those who didn’t have proper knowledge about the test cases and the software functionality itself. One should have to go through the working of the software so that, it will be easy for him to test after having proper knowledge of the software workings.

  • Is there any specific time to start and stop the Software Testing?

This question might be running in your mind after getting knowledge about Testing. So, to start and stop testing, we have an approach which is called SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) which defines all the life cycle process for the development of the software and it also includes the testing of the software. 

 

A good approach to start testing to initiate the testing process at very early stage of the development process. The reason behind this is if any error or bug encountered at very first stage then it will be easy to remove that bug and its money and time saving as well. Because if an error is encountered in between of any SDLC process then it’s quite difficult to remove that bug from the software. Also removing of any bug might also introduce other errors in the software. So, it’s not easy to do testing and the removing of bugs from the application.

In the SDLC process, the testing is started in the requirement gathering phase till the deployment phase. In the requirement gathering phase, the analysis of the requirements and the verification, are considered as testing. While in the last phase of deployment, the Testing performed by the developer is also considered as testing.

Hence, in each phase of SDLC, there’s a testing process.

But it is hard to answer when to stop testing because testing is never ending process. 

Even after deployment of the software, the testing goes on. Some bugs are not encountered in the developing process or the testing done before deployment. And those bugs are found when the uses start using the application, though the bugs need to be removed for a better quality of the product. That’s why there’s always a testing team which continuously checks the software after deployment for any bugs and removes them.

  • Advantages and Disadvantages of Software Testing: There’s always some positives and negatives in every field. Here we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of software testing.

Let us first discuss the Advantages of Software Testing:

  • Software testing reduces the cost in the development of software
  • It reduces the time required to fix the bugs in the development process
  • It expands the usefulness of the product
  • It helps in enhancement of the software quality
  • Software testing helps us identify errors at very early stage in the development
  • The errors encountered while software testing, are fixed earlier
  • Software testing helps achieve the satisfaction of the customer
  • Software testing helps us to test the performance of the software
  • Software testing helps us to identify any loopholes present in our software, so that we can take any action required to improve the security

Now, let us discuss the disadvantages of Software Testing:

  • Software Testing requires the complete knowledge about the working of the software, which is quite difficult for newly developed softwares.
  • Software Testing requires some tools for testing purposes, which are too costly to purchase and some organizations are not too big that they can afford extra cost of buying a testing software.
  • Software testing doesn’t give the surety that a software is completely bug free because there’s always a possibility that bugs are not encountered at the time of testing, but after the deployment the users encounters bugs in the software application. 
  • For big applications, Software testing cannot be done by a single person, but it needs a team of testers which is sometimes more costly for an organization.