Making Software Testing more Effective
It is true that all the software projects are not always successful. Reason being that majority of the applications upon their completion land up with many compromises on features which had been planned at the time of kicking of the project & lack many features.
In today�s scenarios there is hardly any business house which is not depending upon some software or the other for running its day to day affairs. Billions & Trillion of Dollars worth business transactions are being done every day using commercial software. Hence such businesses largely depending on software applications can get severely affected by the use of unreliable software operating under critical areas
Even human lives happen to be at stake if a software failure happens in Air Traffic Control or in Intensive care units in hospitals or in Nuclear Power Plants etc. Hence ensuring the reliability of the software applications by an effective & scientific testing is becoming a matter of prime importance.
A simple software application poorly coded shall have serious effect on the performance of the environment on the company like deterioration
in performance of the Network or Servers, thereby causing sudden breakdowns.
Software Testing plays an extremely vital role in ensuring the reliability of the software application & the success of the entire project depends on it.
The success of the project and the reliability of the software application depend a lot on the effectiveness of the testing effort.
Great fundamental of Reliability – Test everything that you can
- Test to ensure that all defined requirements have been met
- Test the application to ensure the desired performance
- Test each & every component
- Test every components integrated with each other
- Test the entire application end to end
- Test the application in variety of environments
- Test each & every path of the application
- Test each & every scenarios
- Lastly when everything is done, try to do some more tests before giving up.
What is Effective Software Testing – How to measure the Effectiveness of Software Testing?
Effectiveness of the software testing is measurable to a great degree of precision, provided the basic goals and purpose of testing activity are defined clearly. Few of the goals of the testing process are:
- Testing to be performed to ensure that all types of Bugs or defects are captured & eliminated at the earliest during every phase of the Development Cycle.
- Testing to be performed to ensure that no fresh Bugs get introduced in the final product.
- Testing to be performed to ensure the reliability of the software product.
- Ultimately most important of all is that – testing to be performed to ensure that all the user expectations are met
The effectiveness of testing can be measured with the degree of success in achieving the above goals.
Steps to Effective Software Testing:
Effectiveness of Software Testing is influenced by several factors. Ultimate success of the Project solely depends upon such factors.
A) Coverage:
The scope of the testing process and the test cases encompasses
- All the scenarios occurring during the use of the software application.
- Every business requirement which had been defined for the project.
- Each & every line of code written for the application
Most popular V-Model as described below explains various levels of testing depending upon their focus on various aspects of the application.
The above V-Model describes four levels of testing. Each Level of testing provides adequate test coverage.
Although goal of each of these testing levels differ from each other a little bit, but ultimately goal of every level is aimed at ensuring the reliability of the overall project.
- Unit Testing is aimed to ensure that each and every line of code is tested.
- Integration Testing is aimed to ensure that all the components can be integrated and all the interfaces of every component are working correctly.
- System Testing is aimed to cover all the Paths / Scenarios possible during the use of the system. The system testing is performed in an environment which is similar to the production environment i.e. similar to the environment where the product will be finally deployed. Various types of System Testing are possible for testing various aspects of the software application.
- Acceptance Testing by the user
B) Test Planning and its Proc08ess:
Proper Test Planning is extremely important for ensuring an effective Testing
Effective Testing Process comprises of following steps:
- Defining Test Strategies and Planning.
- testing strategies to ensure that they remain aligned to the ultimate Project Goals
- Designing or Writing of Test Cases.
- Periodic Review of the Test Cases to ensure proper Test Coverage
- Execution of the Test Cases
- Capturing the Test Results
- Tracking the Defects
- Capturing the relevant Metrics
- Analyzing
By following the above-mentioned scientific steps for various levels of testing a reliable product can be expected to roll out.
It is common to find various Bugs / Defects even after the product is released to production. However an effective Testing Strategy and testing process helps to minimize these defects. A Testing Strategy and Testing Process is considered effective, if it minimize or eliminates these Design Defects or Coding Defects which are detected after introduction into the production.
Many More Articles on Best Practices in Manual Testing
An expert on R&D, Online Training and Publishing. He is M.Tech. (Honours) and is a part of the STG team since inception.
Quite a blog. I really need to know when is the right time to hire testers? Thanks