Fundamentals of Software Testing: Concepts And Process 2022 Edition

– High level document defining the test phases to be performed and the testing within those phases for a program, defines the process to be followed in each project. Regression testing is a black box testing http://otnyud.ru/articlesarticle.id112page4.htm technique that consists of re-executing those tests that have had an impact due to code changes. These tests should be executed as often as possible throughout the software development life cycle.

• According to the PractiTest survey, the Agile trend is an undisputed leader, while almost 90 percent of respondents work at least in some Agile projects within their organizations.
• So for this tutorial, we will focus on activities and deliverables for the different stages in STLC life cycle.
• The process of choosing the right tool may take significant time and effort at first but is essential for effective automation testing in the long run.
• Therefore it is important to start testing the software as soon as possible so that the detected issues are resolved and do not snowball.
• Therefore, it enables you to achieve blazing fast Test Execution up to 70% faster than any traditional cloud grids.

Report all the success status and the failure status to the development team or to the respective team regularly. Note down the execution status of each test case and note down the time taken by the system to complete the test cases. HyperExecute by LambdaTest is a next-gen smart testing platform to help businesses run end-to-end automated tests at the fastest speed possible.

If the test result matches up with the pre-defined expectations, the software is considered to have passed the test. There are few or no defects to report, and you can move on to the next stage of the STLC. The test case pass rate gives you a good indication of the quality of the product being tested.

Prerequisites of Test Execution:

Test closure report is an important deliverable before the testing activity is considered complete. The graph below shows the cost of fixing this defect when caught at different stages. The second principle states that testing all combinations of inputs and preconditions is not feasible, except in trivial cases. Let us now find out the objectives of different types of testing in the next section. For software systems, some errors are important while others are not.

Now that we’ve explained the benefits of software testing and its importance, let’s take a closer look at the software testing life cycle to learn more about the six stages of testing. Destructive testing attempts to cause the software or a sub-system to fail. It verifies that the software functions properly even when it receives invalid or unexpected inputs, thereby establishing the robustness of input validation and error-management routines. Software fault injection, in the form of fuzzing, is an example of failure testing.

Logging in with the valid username and password, however; the system throws an error and does not let the user proceed to the next step. Quality is defined as justification of all the requirements of a customer in a product. It is bug-free, delivered on time, within budget, meets requirements, maintainable. Sometimes carried out as an addition to formal testing done by skilled testers aka exploratory testing. Checks the application’s ability to perform under anticipated user loads.

Test Planning

Testing activities need certain environmental factors—such as servers, frameworks, hardware, and software—for executing developed test cases. And it’s mandatory to smoke test and to equip your testers with bug reporting tools. In the developer community, it’s common to hear “it ran on my system, but it’s not running on yours”. Let’s take a look at different phases of the software testing life cycle in detail.

However, it does require a well-developed test suite of testing scripts in order to be truly useful. Concurrent or concurrency testing assesses the behaviour and performance of software and systems that use concurrent computing, generally under normal usage conditions. Typical problems this type of testing will expose are deadlocks, race conditions and problems with shared memory/resource handling.

ISTQB Advanced Level Test Manager Study Material

In addition, bug reporting and retesting are carried out during this process. Test Execution involves verifying the functionality of each feature in the software application, which is placed in different scenarios to validate its response in those situations. It plays a crucial role in the testing process to help teams create robust software applications that meet the end-user requirements.

If test cases will be used, they will be written to guide the tester through each test. Prepare any test data required to run the tests during this phase so you don’t have to spend time doing this during the tests. This phase involves documenting the specific steps that are required to perform a given test. The abstract test cases from the previous step are developed into detailed test steps which will become the test scripts. Entry criteria state which requirements the team has to take care of before starting the testing procedure.

Determine the Test environment details where testing activities will be carried out. Software Testing should start very early in the project life-cycle, as soon as there’s a Functional Requirements Document . The STLC consists of a series of phases carried out methodically to help certify the Application Under Test. During this phase, the documentation from all previous phases is finalized to align it with the delivered system. To make appropriate hardware resources available for testing can be challenging.

Test Case Designing and Development

These seven principles of testing should be guides for all test engineers to help them plan and execute their tests. These principles are also useful for the management to understand testing and develop a realistic expectation from the test process. Using a set of tests repeatedly on the same software product will decrease the efficiency of tests. The fifth testing principle states that a variety of tests and techniques should be used to expose a range of defects across different areas of the product. Exhaustive testing, also known as complete testing, is a test approach in which the test suite comprises all combinations of input values and preconditions. The objective of Operational testing is to ensure reliability and performance.

Businesses often outsource the testing process to a specialist firm like Global App Testing, which combines remote crowdtesting and on-demand testing services. History knows many more examples of software incidents which caused similar damage. Yet, testing remains one of the most disputed topics in software development.

Therefore, it enables you to achieve blazing fast Test Execution up to 70% faster than any traditional cloud grids. The output of the execution of test cases is in the form of test reports, i.e., bug report or Test Execution status report. After the deployment phase, smoke and sanity testing are performed to ensure that the current build is working correctly. Upon satisfying the entry criteria and delivering the test objective, the next phase is to execute the test.

If there are any defects in the product, testers work with the development team. In some cases, they have to contact the stakeholder to gain insight into different product specs. Validation and verification of a product are also important processes of the STLC.

Ensure that powerful tooling is available to both developers and testers. Final Regression Tests − A “final regression testing” is performed to validate the build that has not undergone a change for a period of time. The exit criteria requires the successful validation of all Test Cases; Defects should be closed or deferred; test case execution and defect summary report should be ready.

Sometimes such issues can be fixed by proactively abstracting operating system functionality into a separate program module or library. Unit testing refers to tests that verify the functionality of a specific section of code, usually at the function level. In an object-oriented environment, this is usually at the class level, and the minimal unit tests include the constructors and destructors. Ad hoc testing and exploratory testing are important methodologies for checking software integrity, because they require less preparation time to implement, while the important bugs can be found quickly. However, unless strict documentation of the procedures are maintained, one of the limits of ad hoc testing is lack of repeatability. Software testing methods are traditionally divided into white- and black-box testing.

STLC Phases

This includes testing and support tools such as spreadsheets, word processors, project planning tools, and non-IT tools and equipment. During test execution, the tester executes all planned test cases and verifies whether the expected results match with the actual results. This can be performed manually or automatically using appropriate tools based on the type of testing.

Therefore, efficient software testing should go far beyond just finding errors in the source code. In this article, we have seen phases of the software testing life cycle. In the planning phase, we also identify the design of the test environment and identify the required infrastructure and tools.

A sample testing cycle

Resources include human effort, equipment, and all infrastructure needed for accurate and comprehensive testing. It is the point of reference based on which testing activities are executed and coordinated among a QA team. Some test engineers prefer to make draft automation scripts that can be applied for most test cases at the beginning of the test process. Then, in the execution phase, the scripts are finalized through an iterative process in a highly collaborative setting hosted on the cloud. In the next section, we will discuss the code of ethics for software testing. The Developer always thinks that there are no defects in the code as it was carefully developed.

– Written from a definitive source document like specification or requirement doc. Testing team will meet, discuss and analyze testing artifacts to identify strategies that have to be implemented in the future, taking lessons from the current test cycle. The idea is to remove the process bottlenecks for future test cycles and share best practices for any similar projects in the future. Analyze the requirements and prepare the list of software & hardware required to set up test environment. It’s the configuration of software and/or hardware on which the testing team is to perform the tests.

During this stage, all of the testing strategy is defined, and the test manager determines the effort and cost estimates for the entire project. The effort and cost of testing largely depend on which testing types will be covered and which will be ignored. Each testing type has its distinct characteristics and applications, and testers need to be familiar with them to be able to sort them according to priority. It executed the test with code and compared it with the expected result, and analyses the report. The testing team executes tests based on test planning and strategies.

Depending on the company or the situation, the developer or vendor may create the test environment. If this is the case, the test team should be prepared to do a readiness check, a Build Verification Test of the given environment setup. Make sure any test data necessary is entered into the system and ready to be used.