Types of Software Testing: Does It Make the Cut?

Software testing is used for conducting investigations to provide information about the service being tested or the product’s quality. Testing software can provide an independent, objective view of the software, allowing businesses to understand and appreciate the risks of implementing the software. Types of software testing techniques include the process of executing applications or programs with intents of finding bugs such as errors and defects in the software. The process of verifying and validating a computer application product or program satisfies stakeholder’s needs, can be implemented with similar characteristics, work as expected and meet the requirements guides of its development and design. Here is a course you might like entitled The Best Software Testing Training You Will Ever Get that shows you all the basics you need to be the best software tester ever.

Testing software, depending on the employed testing method, can be implemented in the process of developing the software at any time. Many test efforts traditionally occur after completing the coding process and after defining requirements. Here is an article you might be interested in entitled Defect Life Cycle: Essentials of Software Testing that occurs from the time defects are found to the point that they are fixed. Aside from the article, here is a course entitled The Best Software Testing Training You Will Ever Get that will help you learn quickly from experts about learning and mastering software tests.

Visual Testing

The aim of this type is for developers to be provided with the abilities of examining what occurs at the software failure point by data presentation in the way that information is easily accessible and there is clear expression of the information. The visual testing core is the concept that showing a test failure to someone instead of just providing a description will increase understanding and clarity greatly. Therefore, visual tests required that the entire process of testing be recorded, capturing everything occurring on the system of the test in a video. A real time input tester supplements the output video through a webcam picture-in-a-picture and a microphone audio commentary. In particular, visual testing is well-suited for environments deploying methods that are more agile in their software development since it is a requirement that greater communication between developers and testers be accomplished and collaborations happen with smaller teams. By the way you might also want to check out this course entitled Software Testing that was put together to help you understand testing software from scratch and helping you become much more comfortable with it than you used to be.

Spec-Based Testing

Also called specification based testing; this type aims to test software’s functionality according to the requirements that apply. This test level usually requires test cases that are thorough to be provided to testers, who can then do verifications for certain outputs or inputs, such as whether these are or not the specified expected values in the test cases.

Software Performance Testing

Generally, this type of testing is executed to find out how subsystems or systems perform in terms of stability and responsiveness under a workload in particular. It can also serve to verify, validate, measure and investigate other system quality attributes such as resource usage, reliability and scalability.

Destructive Testing

Destructive testing makes an attempt to cause the sub system or the software to fail. It verifies that the function of the software properly functions even with unexpected or invalid input, thus establishing input validation robustness and routines of managing errors. Fuzzing or software fault injection is one failure test example.

Non-functional vs Functional Testing

This refers to actions verifying code functions or code specific actions. Usually these are found in the documentation for code requirements, although some methodologies of development work from user stories or user cases. Test that are functional tend to get an answer to the question of whether a particular feature works or whether a user can do this. Testing that is non-functional refers to software aspects that might not have to do with user actions or specified functions such as performance and scalability, security and behavior under constraint. The breaking point will be determined by testing, which is the point where performances of scalability extremes lead to unstable executions. Requirements of this type tend to be that reflecting product quality, especially in the contexts of its user’s suitability perspective.

Beta Testing

This can be considered as a form of user acceptance external testing and comes after alpha testing. The software versions are released to a limited audience and are known as beta versions at this stage. It is alter released to people in groups so that even more testing can make sure that the product has few bugs or faults. At times, the open public can access beta versions to increase maximum number of users in the future and to increase the field of feedback.

Alpha Testing

Alpha testing is actual or simulating testing operations done by potential customers or users or an independent testing teams at the site of developers. This is employed often for the software off the shelf as a kind of internal test of acceptance before the software gets to beta tests.

Acceptance Testing

Acceptance testing can be done as part of the process of hand-off between any development’s 2 phases. Smoke tests are used as a test for acceptance before introducing newer builds to the main process of testing, before regression or integration.

Regression Testing

This type focuses on finding a defect after a major change in code has just happened. In other words, it attempts to uncover regressions in the software as lost or degraded features, including old bugs that have returned. These occur whenever the functionality of software stops working correctly. Usually, these occur as a program change consequence that was unintended, when the new part developed collides with code that previously exists. Common methods of testing of this type includes checking whether there have been a re-emergence of fixed faults or re-running previous test case sets to check for errors.

Sanity and Smoke Testing

Sanity testing find out whether you should go on with testing further while smoke testing consists of minimum attempts of operating the software to find out whether there are basic problems that prevent this from working, like tests of build verification.

Compatibility Testing

Perceived or real failure of the software is commonly caused by not being compatible with other operating systems, application systems or environment targets that greatly differ from the application original. For example, in cases where there is lack of compatibility backwards, this can sometimes happen since test developers only test the latest environment of the software.

Installation Testing

This type of test assures that there is correct installation of the system and work is done at the actual hardware of the customer.

Dynamic versus Static Testing

When it comes to testing software, inspections, walk-throughs and reviews are referred to as testing that is ‘static,’ while ‘dynamic’ testing involves actually executing code programmed with a give test case set. Often, static testing is implicit and includes checking source code compliers or structure, proofreading, checking data flow and syntax as static program analyses. When the program itself is run is when dynamic testing takes place. As a matter of fact, before the program is one hundred per cent complete, dynamic testing could start in order for particular code sections can be tested before being applied to discrete modules and functions. Techniques that are typical for this are either using execution or drivers or stubs from an environment of debuggers. Validation is involved in dynamic testing while verification is involved in static testing. Together they improve the quality of the software. Among the static analysis techniques, you can use mutation testing for ensuring that errors will be detected by the test cases which are introduced by getting the source code mutated.

The Box Approach

Traditionally, testing methods used for software are divided into black box or white box testing. Both of these are used for describing a test engineer’s points of views when getting test cases designed.

• Black Box Testing

Software is treated as the black box which examines functionality without any internal implementation of any knowledge. The testers just know how the software is supposed to work, not how it works. Testing methods for black box include specification based testing, exploratory testing, use case testing, model based testing, fuzz testing, decision able testing, state transition tables, all pairs testing, boundary value analysis and equivalence partitioning.

• White Box Testing

Also known as transparent box testing, glass box testing or clear box testing, white box testing tests a program’s internal workings or structures as opposed to the exposed functionality to end users. When testing using the white box method, the system’s internal perspective and skills of programming are utilized for test case designs. Testers select inputs for paths to be exercised through the coding and find the outputs appropriate. This is analogous to testing circuit nodes. This type of test is usually done at the level of the unit. Within a unit, it is able to test paths between unites between subsystems during a test of system levels and during integration. Through this test design method, many errors or issues can become uncovered. However, it may not detect missing requirements or unimplemented specification parts.

• Gray Box Testing

This type of testing involves having algorithms and internal data structure knowledge for the purpose of test design, while getting those tests executed at the black box or the user level. Testers are not exactly required to have total access to the source code of the software. Manipulating formatting output and input data does not qualify as gray box since the output and input are clearly outside the black box. When you conduct integration tests between 2 code modules done by different developers, this distinction is particularly important, especially since only the interface are exposed for the tests.

On the other hand, tests that require the modification of back end repositories for data like a log file or a database does qualify as gray box, as normally users would be able to alter the repository of the data in normal operations of production. This type of testing could also determine error messages or boundary values by using reverse engineering.

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