Written by Cody Cleveland

Quality Assurance (QA) is more than just a buzzword. It is delivering on a promise, a promise of satisfaction, or of goods and services that function in a specified way. It is a vital component of customer relations and is a necessity in today’s fast-paced world. But how does quality assurance play into your actual projects? One way is through software testing.

Software Testing is the process of verifying and evaluating that an application or software product does what it is intended to do. The benefits of testing include reducing development costs, improving performance, and preventing bugs. The main goal is to ensure there are no errors.

Testing itself costs money and many organizations may balk at this cost. However, companies can save millions per year in support and development if they have a good and consistent testing technique and QA processes in place. Early software testing uncovers problems before a product goes to market. The sooner development teams receive test feedback, the sooner they can address issues such as security vulnerabilities, invalid or incorrect functionality, poor design functionality, scalability issues, or architectural flaws.

Most importantly, software testing helps organizations proactively address problems. It is a win-win opportunity!

Different Types of Software Testing

There are diverse types of software testing, and it can be confusing to know what testing to use at various points in your project.

Acceptance Testing is completed by customers, users, and/or authorized entities to determine if the software/application meets the needs and business processes. This can be one of the most important phases as the testers can decide whether the client approves the software/application or not. There are four main types of Acceptance Testing – Alpha and Beta Testing, Contract Acceptance Testing, Regulation Acceptance Testing, and Operational Testing.

Integration Testing is evaluating the components or modules when integrated to verify that everything is working as expected. The goal is to assess the modules which are working individually and ensure they are working once integrated with each other. One main advantage of Integration Testing is that it does not require the other modules to be completed for testing to be completed.

Unit Testing is a way to test the smallest piece of code that can be logically isolated in a system. Unit Testing is completed during the Development or Coding Phase. A Unit can consist of Procedures, Modules, Objects, Methods, or Individual Functions. Unit Tests can be automated or can be completed manually. There are tools that can be used to complete these automatically. Some of these tools are Junit, NUnit, JMockit, EEMA, and PHPUnit.

Functional Testing is the process through which Quality Assurance testers determine if a piece of software is acting in accordance with pre-determined requirements. It uses black-box testing techniques, in which the tester has no knowledge of the internal system logic. Functional testing is only concerned with validating if a system works as intended. The Functional Testing process consists of five main steps:

• Identify the function that is to be performed
• Create input data based on the function specifications
• Determine the output based on the function specifications
• Execute the test case
• Compare the actual and expected output

Performance Testing is a software testing process used for testing the response time, reliability, speed, stability, scalability, and resource usage of a software application under a certain workload. The main purpose of performance testing is to identify and eliminate the performance bottlenecks in the software application. There are six main types of Performance Testing – Volume Testing, Endurance Testing, Spike Testing, Scalability Testing, Stress Testing, and Load testing.

Regression Testing verifies that a code change in the software does not impact the existing functionality of the product. Regression testing can be performed on a new build when there is a significant change in the original functionality or in a single bug fix. Regression Testing is another portion that can either be tested manually or tested automatically with a program. The two main applications used for automated Regression Testing are Avo Assure and TimeShiftX.

Stress Testing determines the robustness of software by testing the limits of normal operation. Stress Testing focuses on availability and error handling under a heavy load rather than on what is correct behavior under normal situations. The five main steps of the Stress Testing process are:

• Planning the stress test
• Create automation scripts
• Script execution
• Results analysis
• Tweaking optimization

There are five main types of Stress Testing – Server-client Stress Testing, Product Stress Testing, Transaction Stress Testing, Systematic Stress Testing, and Analytical Stress Testing.

Usability Testing is a method for measuring how user-friendly a software application is while maintaining efficiency and accuracy. Usability Testing focuses on the flexibility of the application to handle the controls of an application to meet its objectives. The five main steps of the Usability Testing process are Planning, Recruiting, Usability Testing, Data Analysis, and Reporting. Some of the main advantages of Usability Testing are improving end-user satisfaction, uncovering usability issues, and helping to gather true feedback from the customer.

Software Testing Best Practices

Wading through the types of testing can be confusing and teams can get bogged down trying to plan for comprehensive software testing. However, there are industry best practices that can help streamline the process and set the organization up for success, including preparation and automation.

Preparing for software testing is a critical task that can maximize success. Preparation tasks or steps include developing test cases, writing scripts, defining the test environment, and ensuring testers are allocated and understand their role. Once testing is complete, testers should know how and where to submit their defect reports and team members should be lined up to analyze test results. This preparation ensures that testing is comprehensive and that the results of testing can be acted upon to improve the software.

Manual testing or ad hoc testing can be used for small builds. For larger systems, tools are commonly used to automate tasks. The more tests that are automated, and run early, the better. Some teams build in-house test automation tools while others use an existing automation product, such as those mentioned above. The major advantages for automated best practices are Configuration Management, Service Virtualization, Defect or Bug Tracking, Metrics and Reporting, and Continuous Testing.

Boost Your Testing Today

Software Testing helps put out a quality application that the customer is guaranteed to love. By addressing bugs and defects before release, you can keep your customers coming back to you for their needs. While testing can be overwhelming, there are best practices that can streamline the testing process while ensuring a quality product. Need to boost your testing? Contact us for experienced help today!

Written by Cody Cleveland

Cody Cleveland is an experienced Business Analyst and Tester. Driven by quality testing, he takes pride in providing the best costumer experience possible by ensuring all Test Cases, User Stories, Validations, and other documents are completed consistently, thoroughly, and as detailed as possible. As a Business Analyst, his goals include making the testing/day to day experience for the end user/customer as seamless and easy as possible and providing the customer with a team they can trust.