Software Testing is the practice of evaluating a software’s requirements based on product specifications and to ensure the software is bug free. Testing involves in execution of software components and units by Manual Testing or Automated Testing tools and methods. In Software Testing the goal is to identify bugs or missing requirements.
In general, Software testing is the verification of application under test which is called “AUT”.
Here’s a brief overview of what we will learn together in this article:
- What is software testing?
- Different methods of software testing
- Different types of software testing
- Benefits of software testing
Different methods of software testing
Overall there are two methods of software testing
- Manual testing
- Automated testing
Manual testing
In Manual testing testers manually navigating through the features and functionalities of an app, software, website in order to evaluate them based on software specifications. For manual testing, testers step into the shoes of target end user and tries to behave the same as the target user with goal of finding the possible bugs and errors.
Some people say Manual testing can be avoided altogether because of automated testing which is faster, but that is untrue and usually there is a need for Manual testing in every project.
Automated testing
Automated testing is the practice of testing the software features by automating the processes using any automation tools. In contrast with Manual testing, Automated testing is less involved with manually working with the software by the tester. Automation testing makes it possible for companies and testing teams to deliver the products and software faster than manual testing, but it doesn’t mean with automation testing there’s no need for manual testing.
Based on the cost, budget and timeline of a project it can be decided to test by automated testing tools or manually or a mix of both.
What are different types of software testing?
We can categorize software testing to 3 major categories:
- Functional Testing
- Non-Functional Testing
- Maintenance
Functional testing
Functional testing analyzes the functionality of software features based on the requirements.
Here’s a list of some of the functional testing types:
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- Smoke Testing
- System Testing
- User Acceptance Testing
Non-functional testing
Non functional testing involves in non functional features of a software, as performance, usability and so on.
Here’s a list of some of the non functional testing types:
- Performance
- Stress
- Load
- Volume
- Usability
Maintenance
Maintenance testing is the process of testing the software after a new release of the software provided. Generally its goal is to find out any possible bugs that has been emerged from changes done to the software
Here’s a list of some of the Maintenance Testing types:
- Regression
- Maintenance
Benefits of software testing
Software testing is a part of software development life cycle which is called SDLC. Software testing goal is to find errors and bugs inside a software and finding bugs as early as possible will make it cost effective.
Here’s a list of software testing benefits:
- Less final cost of the software: It’s always recommended to test and evaluate software from different aspects of it as early as possible. Early software testing will result is less cost for fixing bugs
- Ensuring security of software: One of the main reasons of software testing process is to make the software bug-free from security side. Customers always looking for trustable and safe applications, websites and software and testing will remove risks and problems potentially.
- Higher quality product: Testing ensures the delivered software is higher quality than the software which has not been tested.
- Customer satisfaction: Overall goal of testing is customer satisfaction, as the overall goal of software is to fulfill a need for a specific group of people.
In this article we learned about what is software testing, it’s methods and types and benefits of software testing all together. Software testing is one of the main phases of software development life cycle and with high probability there will be major bugs in the produced software if software testing has not been applied.