A very important part of the process of software development is the process of software testing. The write up will give an overview of what software testing is and what are its different types.
Software Testing: Introduction
Software testing is done to make sure that the software is at par with the standards and there are no errors and bugs in it. The process of software testing is important to ensure that the performance, reliability and credibility are maintained and if any error is identified, it is resolved before the final delivery. The main agenda of software testing is to make sure that the needs of the client/end users are fulfilled.
Types Of Software Testing
To ensure that the software is glitch free, different types of software testing are done. A few of them are listed down below:
- Acceptance Testing
Acceptance Testing is when the software/product is handed over to the customers for final inspection, so that any error/glitch faced by the user is rectified before the final production. A lot of new acceptance testing software is used to ensure precision of results. There are different types of acceptance testing:
- Alpha Testing: It is done before the product is released for the users.
- Beta Testing: Used by users in real life scenarios.
- User acceptance Testing: It is an end user test
- Business acceptance Testing: Testing is business oriented
- Contract Acceptance Testing: Parameters of testing are in accordance with the contract
- Operational Acceptance Testing: Testing done before production phase to ensure operational readiness.
- Integration Testing
The process of testing the functionality of different components of the software is known integration testing. It checks if the different components are working properly when integrated and used together. So to make sure that the different elements of the program/software are compatible with each other, integration testing is important. Just like acceptance testing, integration testing also has different types, like:
- Incremental Approach: It tests modules one by one and uses different approaches like: Top Down Approach, Bottom Up Approach, Hybrid Approach
- Big Bang Method: Components are tested as single unit
- Stubs and Drivers: Dummy programs used in integration testing
- Functional testing
Functional testing ensures that every feature of the programme works in accordance to the guidelines mainly focusing on the user requirements and focuses on the final output of processing. There are different types of functional testings:
- Unit Testing: Cheks the different components
- Sanity Testing: Checks the newly added features
- Smoke testing : Checks the performance of basic features under pressure
- Regression tests: Old features are not affected by new changes
- Usability testing: Checks if the application is user friendly.
- Stress testing:
Stress testing as the name suggests, is a type of intensive testing process which checks the tolerance of the software. It determines the threshold capacity of the software towards error handling and using it intensively until it crashes. This kind of testing is done to ensure standards and to make the software reliable. There are different kinds of stress testing as well, a few of them are listed below:
- Application Stress Testing: Finds defects related to performances
- Exploratory Stress Testing: Testing for abnormal conditions
- Transactional Stress Testing: Testing on transactions between applications.
- Performance Testing
Performance testing measures the response time, error rate, wait time and even the scalability aspect of the software. The aim of performance testing is to find and make corrections in the performance parameters of the software.
- Load testing: Testing under a real life environment.
- Spike testing: Testing performance for abnormal spikes.
- Scalability testing: Testing the ability to scale up or down depending on the number of users.
- Volume testing: Testing performance under data load.
- System Testing
Testing the entire software/program as a whole is known as System Testing. This is a very important part of the software testing process. It includes tests to make sure that there is no flaw in the individual functioning of the components as well as the functioning as an integrated unit. A few different types of system testing are given below:
- Migration Testing: Testing for data loss while transferring.
- Recovery Testing: Testing failure recovery.
End Note
The entire process of software testing covers the aspect of performance, reliability and functioning of the software. This writeup summarises the basics of software testing and how the different types of software testing cover the different aspects of checking the software/program before presenting it to the client/end user. It is a very crucial part of the process of software development.
