Risk And Testing We have mentioned before how risk is an important factor in the testing activity. We base our testing efforts or bonds amount of risk in delivering the product too early. If the risk is high, then we need to spend more effort in testing the software. If the risk is low enough, then we can deliver the software. Definition of Risk so what is risk? After all? There are two parts to the definition of risk. The first part, risk involves the possibility of an event in…

Special Considerations for Test Execution Tools In order to have a smooth and successful implementation. There are a number of things that should be considered when selecting and integrating test execution tools into an organization. As we mentioned before, test execution tools test the software using automated test scripts. This type of tools often require significant effort in order to attract achieve significant benefits. Test execution tools are used by testers. Therefore, any tester who wishes to use a scripting test execution tool will need to use programming skills to…

Tools Support for Testing: Introduction As seen in the previous sections, there are many tasks and activities that need to be performed during the testing process. In order to assist in making the testing process easier to perform and manage, many different types of tools or software applications have been developed and used for a wide variety of testing tasks. Some of them have been developed inhouse by an organization’s own software development team and testing department. Others have been developed by software houses to sell to organizations that perform…

Test Levels vs Test Types One last thing to talk about is the relationship between test levels and test types. What kind of test types can be performed at each test level? Let’s consider a banking application and look at the relationship one by one for a banking application, starting with functional tests. For component testing, tests are designed based on how a component should calculate compound interest. For component integration testing, tests are designed based on how account information captured at the user interface is passed through the business…

Testing Levels : Integration Testing Now that each unit has been proven to be working correctly, individually and ready to go, the next level would be to put those units together to build the system. This is what we call integration. At this stage, testers concentrate slowly on the integration itself. For example, if they are integrating module A with module B, they are interested in testing the community between those modules, not the functionality of the individual module, as that was done already during component testing tests. Thus, examples…

Exploratory Testing If your company gave you the software and asked you to find bugs in it and that’s it. It turns out it’s a testing technique called exploratory testing. So your company is not bad after all. Exhibitory testing has been mentioned in the syllabus in several places, but I prefer to talk about it in one place here to avoid introducing new terminologies without knowing exactly what we are talking about. What happens in exploratory testing is that we use the tester’s experience to test the software without…

Use Case Testing Last technique in the black boxing or specification based techniques is use cases. Use cases are one way of specifying functionality as business scenarios or process flows.  They describe interactions between actors, in this case users or external systems and the system itself, which produce a result of value to the system user or the customer is based on use cases at the business process level, often called scenarios. Biotechly useful in exercising business rules or bosses flows and will often identify gaps or weaknesses during real…

Boundary Value Analysis Boris PISR and American Software Engineering author says that bugs lock in corners and congregate at boundaries. One thing we know about the kinds of mistakes that programmers make is that errors tend to cluster around boundaries. Some developers might get confused about our employee age and unintentionally get confused about the numbers 20, n, 50 and boot them out of range. A developer might use the wrong comparison sign and use less than, instead of less than or equal or vice versa. There are many ways…

Test Techniques This section covers a very important and the popular topic of test design techniques. This is where testers get their creativity to work and come up with ideas on how to test the software. As we mentioned before, exhaustive testing is impossible. That means we cannot test everything. So we have to be very, very selective on how to test the software. So how to design the perfect test case is where the test design techniques come into action. The purpose of a test design technique is to…

Static Testing Basics and differences with Dynamic Testing We have mentioned static testing in the first section of this course and said that static techniques test software without executing the software code, while dynamic testing, on the other hand, requires the execution or running of the software. Under test, static testing can be considered the first line of defense in minimizing defects from the final software by removing the defects from the work products that we shall use in building our software or as test basis and hence makes those…