Types of Software testing

Software testing is necessary because mistakes happen. Some may be irrelevant, but some are dangerous and even costly. It is paramount to check anything and everything because things could always go wrong. There are various reasons that clearly tells why software testing is vital and the major things that should be taken into account while testing any app or product.

THE RELEVANCE OF SOFTWARE TESTING

Software resting is very important due to the following reasons:

1. Testing is really needed to determine errors and defects made during the development process.
2. It is important because it ascertains customer reliability and the satisfaction in the app.
3. Testing is important to ensure product quality.
4. It is necessary to provide facilities to customers, such as delivery of high quality software app that needs lower maintenance cost.
5. It is required for effective performance of software product or app.

THE TYPES OF SOFTWARE TESTING

1. Agile Testing. It is a kind of software testing, which accommodates agile software development practices and approach. In an agile development scenario, testing is a vital part of developing the software and is done together with coding. Furthermore, agile testing enables iterative and incremental coding and testing. There are a lot of benefits to a testing program when working in agile. The values that agile methodology emphasizes reduce many friction in testing and bug fixing, and is part of the reason for Agile’s popularity.
2. Ad-hoc Testing. This is a very informal and unstructured kind of software resting and could be done by any stakeholder with on reference to any test design or test case documents. The person doing Ad-hoc testing has good comprehension of the workflows and domain of the app in an attempt to find defects and break the software. Ad-hoc testing is meant to find defects not found by existing test cases. Ad-hoc testing is done based on the skill and knowledge of the system being tested. Testers focus on testing because there is no documentation needed.
3. Acceptance Testing. It is a kind of formal type testing, which is performed by an end user when features have been delivered by developers. The goal of this type of testing is to see if the software conforms to the business requirements and the requirements earlier provided. Acceptance tests normally are documented at the start of the sprint and is a means for developers and testers to work towards a shared business domain and common understanding of domain knowledge. Acceptance testing tells the extent of the software’s functionality, but also tells how usable it is.
4. Automated Testing. This is a testing approach that uses testing tools or programming tools to run the test cases by suing software or custom developed test utilities. Most automated tools provided playback and capture facility. Nevertheless, there are tools that need writing comprehensive scripting or programming for automating test cases. Automate testing has long been considered vital for big software development companies, but often is thought to be difficult or expensive for smaller organizations to implement. However, automated tests could save money in the long run since tests could be run over and over again with no additional cost and are much faster compared to manual tests.
5. Manual Testing. It includes manually testing software, such as for instance, without the use of any automated script or tool. In this kind of testing, the tester takes over the role of the end-user and tests the software to determine any bug or unexpected behavior. There are various stages for manual testing, including integration testing, unit testing, system testing and user acceptance testing. Testers utilize test cases, test plans or test scenarios to test software to ascertain the completeness of testing. Also, manual testing includes exploratory testing, as testers explore the software to determine if there are errors in it.
6. Unit Testing. Unit Testing is a process of software development wherein the smallest testable parts of an app, called units are independently and individually scrutinized for proper operation. Unit testing could be manually done by often is automated. This type of testing is a component of a test-driven development, which is a pragmatic method, which takes a meticulous approach to build a product by means of revision and continual testing. Test-driven development requires developers to first write falling unit tests. They then write code and refactor the app until the test passes. Unit testing involves just those characteristics vital to the performance of a unit under test. This encourages developers to change source code without direct concerns on how these changes could affect the functioning of other units or the program as a whole.

There are various types of software testing that could be performed to ensure the efficiency and the security of the software developed.

Ritesh Mehta is the Sales Director at TatvaSoft Australia, a Software & mobile app development company. For Over 15 years, he has been professionally active in financial management, software development.