Software Testing Methods: A Rundown of the Main Processes

The basic purpose for software testing is to find the errors in the software or coding in the software. During testing the software is tested for its quality, functionality, correctness, completeness, maintainability, efficiency, performance, capability, portability and usability. The errors or bugs in the software are easy to locate but are difficult to rectify. The software testing identifies the errors and these are to be rectified by the coder or tester. Once the errors are rectified the software is tested again. It may so happen that the software may not operate properly after the removal of bugs. The cycle of testing and retesting goes on until the software is fully made functional without errors. This is an expensive iterative process but cannot be avoided because of negative consequences. If the bug is serious consequences will be disastrous; some incidents are airplane crashes, stock market delays etc. One can skip the testing if the errors are minor.

The choice of the type of software testing methods is mainly dependent on the software and also the type of errors that are likely to occur. Tests conducted to maintain the quality of the software ensure that there are no serious errors. For any software to pass through quality tests three criteria are used i.e. functionality, engineering and adaptability. The output of functionality tests are correctness, reliability, usability and integrity. Engineering deals with interiors and takes care of efficiency, testability, documentation and structure. Flexibility, reusability and maintainability are necessary for future and this is taken care of by adaptability. The process of verification and validation testing, tests for these three qualities.

The most important and successful test that checks the functionality is black box testing. The black box testing requires no knowledge of internal logic or code structure and is mainly focused on the testing for requirements and functionality of the product/ software application. In this the software tester will input the data and see the correctness of the output data. He is not concerned with the internal operations which make the data do what it does. The white box testing deals with the internal logic and structure of the code. The tests written based on the white box testing strategy incorporate coverage of the code written, branches, paths, statements and internal logic of the code etc. Gray box testing involves having access to internal data structures and algorithms for purposes of designing the test cases, but testing at the user, or black-box level. Gray box testing can be considered as the combination of black box and white box testing. The objective of this testing is to find out defects related to bad design or bad implementation of the system.

The process of testing is very expensive; that too if it is manual. Software is available for automated testing and this type of testing is relatively inexpensive. However, test cases are not available for testing based on different criteria. The success or failure of the software depends on its passing the performance, reliability and security testing.