What Are The Different Types of Software Testing?

Software Testing is the systematic process of uncovering any bugs and quality issues and ultimately verify and validate the software system against requirements. With software becoming prominent in many fields, it is important to deliver software of high quality in preferably less time.

With software being so complex, it is important to look at different aspects of software from different perspectives and use different ways to test it. So naturally testing would be highly categorized. Based on the purpose of software testing, it is divided into two broad categories, functional and non-functional. Let us have a brief look at them:

Functional and Non-functional tests

Functional tests are the ones that involve checking the functional aspects of the software system. That is, the purpose of these tests is to check whether the required functionality is being achieved or not. In contrast to Functional testing, the purpose of non-functional tests is to test the system’s generally required characteristics like performance, security, usability, etc.

Generally, Functional tests are done first and non-functional tests are done later. One must note there are two general ways of doing testing: manual, which refers to the test cases being written and executed by humans and automated in which the tests are done by tools that are preconfigured. With that said, let us delve into types of functional and non-functional testing:

Types of Functional testing

The different kinds of functional testing are Unit testing, Integration testing, Interface testing, Regression testing, Smoke Testing, Sanity Testing, Interface testing, Ad-Hoc testing, and many others. The article briefs about the same.

Unit testing:

Unit testing focuses on a single unit of software, which might be single if block, function, components or a module. This test is fundamental as software systems cannot work as a whole if the basic blocks of it are flawed.

Integration testing:

In contrast to unit testing, Integration tests check how the code of different units works together. This test is important as even when different units work well, new errors may spring up when they are combined to achieve an output.

Regression testing:

When a unit of software is modified, it is important to check if that change has caused an inconsistency elsewhere in the system. This testing of the software system after a change in any component is called Regression testing.

Interface Testing:

When there are any interfaces in the software such as GUI, CLI, API, etc, it is important to see how they are interacting with the users and target software and make sure that the working is validated and verified. This testing of interfaces is called Interface testing.

Smoke Testing:

The purpose of the smoke test is to determine whether the software build that is currently deployed is stable or not. The Quality Assurance team would proceed with testing only if the build is stable.

Types of Non-functional testing:

The different kinds of non-functional testing include Performance testing, Usability testing, Accessibility testing, Penetration Testing, Security testing, Documentation testing, Reliability testing, Stress testing among many others. Let us discuss them

Usability testing:

The main goal of usability testing is to check if the particular software under consideration meets the intended purpose and understand the overall usability of the system.

Performance testing:

Performance testing checks the performance of the system under different conditions and loads. The main things that are measured in performance testing include throughput, response times, resource utilization levels, and many more.

Security testing:

With the threat of cyber attacks increasing, testing the system for any security homes is very important. Security testing is done to check if there are any vulnerabilities in the system that might expose it to attackers and the formulation of proper measures to patch them.

Reliability testing:

In Reliability testing, the software system is checked whether it operates fail-free for a certain period of time in a particular environment. Ensuring reliability is essential as some software failures cost a lot of money and sometimes, lives.

Load Testing:

In Load testing, The ability of the software to handle the expected number of transactions is tested. Thus, by performing load testing, one can verify the system’s behavior under normal and peak conditions of usage.

These are a few of the major types in the large realm of Software Testing. With increasing technology and improvement of understanding, new types may come up, so software testers always need to be aware of all happenings in the industry.

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