software testing software development core activities processes requirements design engineering construction testing debugging deployment maintenance paradigms and models agile cleanroom incremental prototyping spiral v model waterfall methodologies and frameworks asd devops dad dsdm fdd iid kanban lean sd less mdd msf psp rad rup safe scrum semat tsp up xp supporting disciplines configuration management documentation software quality assurance sqa project management user experience practices atdd bdd cco ci cd ddd pp standup tdd tools compiler debugger profiler gui designer modeling ide build automation release automation infrastructure as code testing standards and bodies of knowledge babok cmmi ieee standards iso 9001 isoiec standards pmbok swebok itil glossaries artificial intelligence computer science electrical and electronics engineering vte software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the software product or service under test software testing can also provide an objective independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation test techniques include the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs errors or other defects and verifying that the software product is fit for use software testing involves the execution of a software component or system component to evaluate one or more properties of interest in general these properties indicate the extent to which the component or system under test meets the requirements that guided its design and development responds correctly to all kinds of inputs performs its functions within an acceptable time is sufficiently usable can be installed and run in its intended environments and achieves the general result its stakeholders desire as the number of possible tests for even simple software components is practically infinite all software testing uses some strategy to select tests that are feasible for the available time and resources as a result software testing typically but not exclusively attempts to execute a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs errors or other defects the job of testing is an iterative process as when one bug is fixed it can illuminate other deeper bugs or can even create new ones software testing can provide objective independent information about the quality of software and risk of its failure to users or sponsors software testing can be conducted as soon as executable software even if partially complete exists the overall approach to software development often determines when and how testing is conducted for example in a phased process most testing occurs after system requirements have been defined and then implemented in testable programs in contrast under an agile approach requirements programming and testing are often done concurrently overview although testing can determine the correctness of software under the assumption of some specific hypotheses see hierarchy of testing difficulty below testing cannot identify all the defects within software comparable products past versions of the same product inferences about intended or expected purpose user or customer expectations relevant standards applicable laws or other criteria a primary purpose of testing is to detect software failures so that defects may be discovered and corrected testing cannot establish that a product functions properly under all conditions but only that it does not function properly under specific conditions4143 every software product has a target audience for example the audience for video game software is completely different from banking software therefore when an organization develops or otherwise invests in a software product it can assess whether the software product will be acceptable to its end users its target audience its purchasers and other stakeholders software testing aids the process of attempting to make this assessment defects and failures not all software defects are caused by coding errors one common source of expensive defects is requirement gaps eg unrecognized requirements that result in errors of omission by the program designer426 requirement gaps can often be nonfunctional requirements such as testability scalability maintainability usability performance and security software faults occur through the following processes a programmer makes an error mistake which results in a defect fault bug in the software source code if this defect is executed in certain situations the system will produce wrong results causing a failure a single defect may result in a wide range of failure symptoms input combinations and preconditions a fundamental problem with software testing is that testing under all combinations of inputs and preconditions initial state is not feasible even with a simple product this means that the number of defects in a software product can be very large and defects that occur infrequently are difficult to find in testing more significantly nonfunctional dimensions of quality how it is supposed to be versus what it is supposed to dousability scalability performance compatibility reliabilitycan be highly subjective something that constitutes sufficient value to one person may be intolerable to another software developers cant test everything but they can use combinatorial test design to identify the minimum number of tests needed to get the coverage they want combinatorial test design enables users to get greater test coverage with fewer tests whether they are looking for speed or test depth they can use combinatorial test design methods to build structured variation into their test cases economics a study conducted by nist in 2002 reports that software bugs cost the us economy 595billion annually more than a third of this cost could be avoided if better software testing was performed outsourcing software testing because of costs is very common with china the philippines and india being preferred destinations roles software testing can be done by dedicated software testers until the 1980s the term software tester was used generally but later it was also seen as a separate profession regarding the periods and the different goals in software testing history the separation of debugging from testing was initially introduced by glenford j myers in 197916 it illustrated the desire of the software engineering community to separate fundamental development activities such as debugging from that of verification testing approach static vs dynamic testing there are many approaches available in software testing reviews walkthroughs or inspections are referred to as static testing whereas actually executing programmed code with a given set of test cases is referred to as dynamic testing static testing is often implicit as proofreading plus when programming toolstext editors check source code structure or compilers precompilers check syntax and data flow as static program analysis dynamic testing takes place when the program itself is run dynamic testing may begin before the program is 100 complete in order to test particular sections of code and are applied to discrete functions or modules static testing involves verification whereas dynamic testing also involves validation exploratory approach exploratory testing is an approach to software testing that is concisely described as simultaneous learning test design and test execution cem kaner who coined the term in 1984 the box approach software testing methods are traditionally divided into white and blackbox testing these two approaches are used to describe the point of view that the tester takes when designing test cases a hybrid approach called greybox testing may also be applied to software testing methodology whitebox testing whitebox testing whitebox testing also known as clear box testing glass box testing transparent box testing and structural testing verifies the internal structures or workings of a program as opposed to the functionality exposed to the enduser in whitebox testing an internal perspective of the system the source code as well as programming skills are used to design test cases the tester chooses inputs to exercise paths through the code and determine the appropriate outputs this is analogous to testing nodes in a circuit eg incircuit testing ict while whitebox testing can be applied at the unit integration and system levels of the software testing process it is usually done at the unit level it can test paths within a unit paths between units during integration and between subsystems during a systemlevel test though this method of test design can uncover many errors or problems it might not detect unimplemented parts of the specification or missing requirements techniques used in whitebox testing include api testing testing of the application using public and private apis application programming interfaces code coverage creating tests to satisfy some criteria of code coverage eg the test designer can create tests to cause all statements in the program to be executed at least once fault injection methods intentionally introducing faults to gauge the efficacy of testing strategies mutation testing methods static testing methods code coverage tools can evaluate the completeness of a test suite that was created with any method including blackbox testing this allows the software team to examine parts of a system that are rarely tested and ensures that the most important function points have been tested function coverage which reports on functions executed statement coverage which reports on the number of lines executed to complete the test decision coverage which reports on whether both the true and the false branch of a given test has been executed 100 statement coverage ensures that all code paths or branches in terms of control flow are executed at least once this is helpful in ensuring correct functionality but not sufficient since the same code may process different inputs correctly or incorrectly pseudotested functions and methods are those that are covered but not specified it is possible to remove their body without breaking any test case blackbox testing blackbox testing black box diagram blackbox testing also known as functional testing treats the software as a black box examining functionality without any knowledge of internal implementation without seeing the source code the testers are only aware of what the software is supposed to do not how it does it specificationbased testing aims to test the functionality of software according to the applicable requirements this level of testing usually requires thorough test cases to be provided to the tester who then can simply verify that for a given input the output value or behavior either is or is not the same as the expected value specified in the test case test cases are built around specifications and requirements ie what the application is supposed to do it uses external descriptions of the software including specifications requirements and designs to derive test cases these tests can be functional or nonfunctional though usually functional specificationbased testing may be necessary to assure correct functionality but it is insufficient to guard against complex or highrisk situations one advantage of the black box technique is that no programming knowledge is required whatever biases the programmers may have had the tester likely has a different set and may emphasize different areas of functionality on the other hand blackbox testing has been said to be like a walk in a dark labyrinth without a flashlight because they do not examine the source code there are situations when a tester writes many test cases to check something that could have been tested by only one test case or leaves some parts of the program untested this method of test can be applied to all levels of software testing unit integration system and acceptance it typically comprises most if not all testing at higher levels but can also dominate unit testing as well component interface testing component interface testing is a variation of blackbox testing with the focus on the data values beyond just the related actions of a subsystem component unusual data values in an interface can help explain unexpected performance in the next unit visual testing the aim of visual testing is to provide developers with the ability to examine what was happening at the point of software failure by presenting the data in such a way that the developer can easily find the information she or he requires and the information is expressed clearly at the core of visual testing is the idea that showing someone a problem or a test failure rather than just describing it greatly increases clarity and understanding visual testing therefore requires the recording of the entire test process capturing everything that occurs on the test system in video format output videos are supplemented by realtime tester input via pictureinapicture webcam and audio commentary from microphones visual testing provides a number of advantages the quality of communication is increased drastically because testers can show the problem and the events leading up to it to the developer as opposed to just describing it and the need to replicate test failures will cease to exist in many cases the developer will have all the evidence he or she requires of a test failure and can instead focus on the cause of the fault and how it should be fixed ad hoc testing and exploratory testing are important methodologies for checking software integrity because they require less preparation time to implement while the important bugs can be found quickly further information graphical user interface testing greybox testing gray box testing greybox testing american spelling graybox testing involves having knowledge of internal data structures and algorithms for purposes of designing tests while executing those tests at the user or blackbox level the tester will often have access to both the source code and the executable binary manipulating input data and formatting output do not qualify as greybox as the input and output are clearly outside of the black box that we are calling the system under test this distinction is particularly important when conducting integration testing between two modules of code written by two different developers where only the interfaces are exposed for the test by knowing the underlying concepts of how the software works the tester makes betterinformed testing choices while testing the software from outside typically a greybox tester will be permitted to set up an isolated testing environment with activities such as seeding a database the tester can observe the state of the product being tested after performing certain actions such as executing sql statements against the database and then executing queries to ensure that the expected changes have been reflected greybox testing implements intelligent test scenarios based on limited information this will particularly apply to data type handling exception handling and so on testing levels broadly speaking there are at least three levels of testing unit testing integration testing and system testing tests are frequently grouped into one of these levels by where they are added in the software development process or by the level of specificity of the test unit testing unit testing unit testing refers to tests that verify the functionality of a specific section of code usually at the function level in an objectoriented environment this is usually at the class level and the minimal unit tests include the constructors and destructors these types of tests are usually written by developers as they work on code whitebox style to ensure that the specific function is working as expected one function might have multiple tests to catch corner cases or other branches in the code unit testing alone cannot verify the functionality of a piece of software but rather is used to ensure that the building blocks of the software work independently from each other unit testing is a software development process that involves a synchronized application of a broad spectrum of defect prevention and detection strategies in order to reduce software development risks time and costs it is performed by the software developer or engineer during the construction phase of the software development lifecycle unit testing aims to eliminate construction errors before code is promoted to additional testing this strategy is intended to increase the quality of the resulting software as well as the efficiency of the overall development process depending on the organizations expectations for software development unit testing might include static code analysis dataflow analysis metrics analysis peer code reviews code coverage analysis and other software testing practices integration testing integration testing integration testing is any type of software testing that seeks to verify the interfaces between components against a software design software components may be integrated in an iterative way or all together big bang normally the former is considered a better practice since it allows interface issues to be located more quickly and fixed integration testing works to expose defects in the interfaces and interaction between integrated components modules progressively larger groups of tested software components corresponding to elements of the architectural design are integrated and tested until the software works as a system system testing system testing tests a completely integrated system to verify that the system meets its requirements for example a system test might involve testing a logon interface then creating and editing an entry plus sending or printing results followed by summary processing or deletion or archiving of entries then logoff operational acceptance testing operational acceptance testing operational acceptance is used to conduct operational readiness prerelease of a product service or system as part of a quality management system oat is a common type of nonfunctional software testing used mainly in software development and software maintenance projects this type of testing focuses on the operational readiness of the system to be supported or to become part of the production environment hence it is also known as operational readiness testing ort or operations readiness and assurance ora testing functional testing within oat is limited to those tests that are required to verify the nonfunctional aspects of the system in addition the software testing should ensure that the portability of the system as well as working as expected does not also damage or partially corrupt its operating environment or cause other processes within that environment to become inoperative testing types techniques and tactics different labels and ways of grouping testing may be testing types software testing tactics or techniques testingcup polish championship in software testing katowice may 2016 installation testing installation testing most software systems have installation procedures that are needed before they can be used for their main purpose testing these procedures to achieve an installed software system that may be used is known as installation testing compatibility testing compatibility testing a common cause of software failure real or perceived is a lack of its compatibility with other application software operating systems or operating system versions old or new or target environments that differ greatly from the original such as a terminal or gui application intended to be run on the desktop now being required to become a web application which must render in a web browser for example in the case of a lack of backward compatibility this can occur because the programmers develop and test software only on the latest version of the target environment which not all users may be running this results in the unintended consequence that the latest work may not function on earlier versions of the target environment or on older hardware that earlier versions of the target environment were capable of using sometimes such issues can be fixed by proactively abstracting operating system functionality into a separate program module or library smoke and sanity testing sanity testing determines whether it is reasonable to proceed with further testing smoke testing consists of minimal attempts to operate the software designed to determine whether there are any basic problems that will prevent it from working at all such tests can be used as build verification test regression testing regression testing regression testing focuses on finding defects after a major code change has occurred specifically it seeks to uncover software regressions as degraded or lost features including old bugs that have come back such regressions occur whenever software functionality that was previously working correctly stops working as intended typically regressions occur as an unintended consequence of program changes when the newly developed part of the software collides with the previously existing code common methods of regression testing include rerunning previous sets of test cases and checking whether previously fixed faults have reemerged the depth of testing depends on the phase in the release process and the risk of the added features they can either be complete for changes added late in the release or deemed to be risky or be very shallow consisting of positive tests on each feature if the changes are early in the release or deemed to be of low risk regression testing is typically the largest test effort in commercial software development due to checking numerous details in prior software features and even new software can be developed while using some old test cases to test parts of the new design to ensure prior functionality is still supported acceptance testing acceptance testing acceptance testing can mean one of two things a smoke test is used as a build acceptance test prior to further testing eg before integration or regression acceptance testing performed by the customer often in their lab environment on their own hardware is known as user acceptance testing uat acceptance testing may be performed as part of the handoff process between any two phases of development alpha testing alpha testing is simulated or actual operational testing by potential userscustomers or an independent test team at the developers site alpha testing is often employed for offtheshelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing before the software goes to beta testing beta testing beta testing comes after alpha testing and can be considered a form of external user acceptance testing versions of the software known as beta versions are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team known as beta testers the software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs beta versions can be made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users and to deliver value earlier for an extended or even indefinite period of time perpetual beta functional vs nonfunctional testing functional testing refers to activities that verify a specific action or function of the code these are usually found in the code requirements documentation although some development methodologies work from use cases or user stories functional tests tend to answer the question of can the user do this or does this particular feature work nonfunctional testing refers to aspects of the software that may not be related to a specific function or user action such as scalability or other performance behavior under certain constraints or security testing will determine the breaking point the point at which extremes of scalability or performance leads to unstable execution nonfunctional requirements tend to be those that reflect the quality of the product particularly in the context of the suitability perspective of its users continuous testing continuous testing continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate destructive testing destructive testing destructive testing attempts to cause the software or a subsystem to fail it verifies that the software functions properly even when it receives invalid or unexpected inputs thereby establishing the robustness of input validation and errormanagement routines software fault injection in the form of fuzzing is an example of failure testing various commercial nonfunctional testing tools are linked from the software fault injection page there are also numerous opensource and free software tools available that perform destructive testing further information exception handling and recovery testing software performance testing software performance testing performance testing is generally executed to determine how a system or subsystem performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload it can also serve to investigate measure validate or verify other quality attributes of the system such as scalability reliability and resource usage load testing is primarily concerned with testing that the system can continue to operate under a specific load whether that be large quantities of data or a large number of users this is generally referred to as software scalability the related load testing activity of when performed as a nonfunctional activity is often referred to as endurance testing volume testing is a way to test software functions even when certain components for example a file or database increase radically in size stress testing is a way to test reliability under unexpected or rare workloads stability testing often referred to as load or endurance testing checks to see if the software can continuously function well in or above an acceptable period there is little agreement on what the specific goals of performance testing are the terms load testing performance testing scalability testing and volume testing are often used interchangeably realtime software systems have strict timing constraints to test if timing constraints are met realtime testing is used usability testing usability testing is to check if the user interface is easy to use and understand it is concerned mainly with the use of the application accessibility testing accessibility testing may include compliance with standards such as americans with disabilities act of 1990 section 508 amendment to the rehabilitation act of 1973 web accessibility initiative wai of the world wide web consortium w3c security testing security testing is essential for software that processes confidential data to prevent system intrusion by hackers the international organization for standardization iso defines this as a type of testing conducted to evaluate the degree to which a test item and associated data and information are protected so that unauthorised persons or systems cannot use read or modify them and authorized persons or systems are not denied access to them internationalization and localization testing for internationalization and localization validates that the software can be used with different languages and geographic regions the process of pseudolocalization is used to test the ability of an application to be translated to another language and make it easier to identify when the localization process may introduce new bugs into the product globalization testing verifies that the software is adapted for a new culture such as different currencies or time zones actual translation to human languages must be tested too possible localization and globalization failures include software is often localized by translating a list of strings out of context and the translator may choose the wrong translation for an ambiguous source string technical terminology may become inconsistent if the project is translated by several people without proper coordination or if the translator is imprudent literal wordforword translations may sound inappropriate artificial or too technical in the target language untranslated messages in the original language may be left hard coded in the source code some messages may be created automatically at run time and the resulting string may be ungrammatical functionally incorrect misleading or confusing software may use a keyboard shortcut that has no function on the source languages keyboard layout but is used for typing characters in the layout of the target language software may lack support for the character encoding of the target language fonts and font sizes that are appropriate in the source language may be inappropriate in the target language for example cjk characters may become unreadable if the font is too small a string in the target language may be longer than the software can handle this may make the string partly invisible to the user or cause the software to crash or malfunction software may lack proper support for reading or writing bidirectional text software may display images with text that was not localized localized operating systems may have differently named system configuration files and environment variables and different formats for date and currency development testing development testing development testing is a software development process that involves the synchronized application of a broad spectrum of defect prevention and detection strategies in order to reduce software development risks time and costs it is performed by the software developer or engineer during the construction phase of the software development lifecycle development testing aims to eliminate construction errors before code is promoted to other testing this strategy is intended to increase the quality of the resulting software as well as the efficiency of the overall development process depending on the organizations expectations for software development development testing might include static code analysis data flow analysis metrics analysis peer code reviews unit testing code coverage analysis traceability and other software testing practices ab testing ab testing ab testing is a method of running a controlled experiment to determine if a proposed change is more effective than the current approach customers are routed to either a current version control of a feature or to a modified version treatment and data is collected to determine which version is better at achieving the desired outcome concurrent testing concurrent testing in concurrent testing the focus is on the performance while continuously running with normal input and under normal operational conditions as opposed to stress testing or fuzz testing memory leak as well as basic faults are easier to find with this method conformance testing or type testing conformance testing in software testing conformance testing verifies that a product performs according to its specified standards compilers for instance are extensively tested to determine whether they meet the recognized standard for that language testing process traditional waterfall development model a common practice in waterfall development is that testing is performed by an independent group of testers this can happen after the functionality is developed but before it is shipped to the customer145146 at the same moment the development project starts as a continuous process until the project finishes however even in the waterfall development model unit testing is often done by the software development team even when further testing is done by a separate team further information capability maturity model integration and waterfall model agile or xp development model in contrast some emerging software disciplines such as extreme programming and the agile software development movement adhere to a testdriven software development model in this process unit tests are written first by the software engineers often with pair programming in the extreme programming methodology the tests are expected to fail initially each failing test is followed by writing just enough code to make it pass this means the test suites are continuously updated as new failure conditions and corner cases are discovered and they are integrated with any regression tests that are developed unit tests are maintained along with the rest of the software source code and generally integrated into the build process with inherently interactive tests being relegated to a partially manual build acceptance process the ultimate goals of this test process are to support continuous integration and to reduce defect rates this methodology increases the testing effort done by development before reaching any formal testing team in some other development models most of the test execution occurs after the requirements have been defined and the coding process has been completed a sample testing cycle although variations exist between organizations there is a typical cycle for testing the sample below is common among organizations employing the waterfall development model the same practices are commonly found in other development models but might not be as clear or explicit requirements analysis testing should begin in the requirements phase of the software development life cycle during the design phase testers work to determine what aspects of a design are testable and with what parameters those tests work test planning test strategy test plan testbed creation since many activities will be carried out during testing a plan is needed test development test procedures test scenarios test cases test datasets test scripts to use in testing software test execution testers execute the software based on the plans and test documents then report any errors found to the development team this part could be complex when running tests with a lack of programming knowledge test reporting once testing is completed testers generate metrics and make final reports on their test effort and whether or not the software tested is ready for release test result analysis or defect analysis is done by the development team usually along with the client in order to decide what defects should be assigned fixed rejected ie found software working properly or deferred to be dealt with later defect retesting once a defect has been dealt with by the development team it is retested by the testing team regression testing it is common to have a small test program built of a subset of tests for each integration of new modified or fixed software in order to ensure that the latest delivery has not ruined anything and that the software product as a whole is still working correctly test closure once the test meets the exit criteria the activities such as capturing the key outputs lessons learned results logs documents related to the project are archived and used as a reference for future projects automated testing test automation many programming groups to write tests in and continuous integration software will run tests automatically every time code is checked into a version control system while automation cannot reproduce everything that a human can do and all the ways they think of doing it it can be very useful for regression testing however it does require a welldeveloped test suite of testing scripts in order to be truly useful testing tools program testing and fault detection can be aided significantly by testing tools and debuggers testingdebug tools include features such as program monitors permitting full or partial monitoring of program code including instruction set simulator permitting complete instruction level monitoring and trace facilities hypervisor permitting complete control of the execution of program code including program animation permitting stepbystep execution and conditional breakpoint at source level or in machine code code coverage reports formatted dump or symbolic debugging tools allowing inspection of program variables on error or at chosen points automated functional graphical user interface gui testing tools are used to repeat systemlevel tests through the gui benchmarks allowing runtime performance comparisons to be made performance analysis or profiling tools that can help to highlight hot spots and resource usage some of these features may be incorporated into a single composite tool or an integrated development environment ide measurement in software testing software quality quality measures include such topics as correctness completeness security and isoiec 9126 requirements such as capability reliability efficiency portability maintainability compatibility and usability there are a number of frequently used software metrics or measures which are used to assist in determining the state of the software or the adequacy of the testing hierarchy of testing difficulty based on the amount of test cases required to construct a complete test suite in each context ie a test suite such that if it is applied to the implementation under test then we collect enough information to precisely determine whether the system is correct or incorrect according to some specification a hierarchy of testing difficulty has been proposed it includes the following testability classes class i there exists a finite complete test suite class ii any partial distinguishing rate ie any incomplete capability to distinguish correct systems from incorrect systems can be reached with a finite test suite class iii there exists a countable complete test suite class iv there exists a complete test suite class v all cases it has been proved that each class is strictly included in the next for instance testing when we assume that the behavior of the implementation under test can be denoted by a deterministic finitestate machine for some known finite sets of inputs and outputs and with some known number of states belongs to class i and all subsequent classes however if the number of states is not known then it only belongs to all classes from class ii on if the implementation under test must be a deterministic finitestate machine failing the specification for a single trace and its continuations and its number of states is unknown then it only belongs to classes from class iii on testing temporal machines where transitions are triggered if inputs are produced within some realbounded interval only belongs to classes from class iv on whereas testing many nondeterministic systems only belongs to class v but not all and some even belong to class i the inclusion into class i does not require the simplicity of the assumed computation model as some testing cases involving implementations written in any programming language and testing implementations defined as machines depending on continuous magnitudes have been proved to be in class i other elaborated cases such as the testing framework by matthew hennessy under must semantics and temporal machines with rational timeouts belong to class ii testing artifacts a software testing process can produce several artifacts the actual artifacts produced are a factor of the software development model used stakeholder and organisational needs test plan a test plan is a document detailing the approach that will be taken for intended test activities the plan may include aspects such as objectives scope processes and procedures personnel requirements and contingency plans a test plan can be in some cases part of a wide test strategy which documents overall testing approaches which may itself be a master test plan or even a separate artifact traceability matrix a traceability matrix is a table that correlates requirements or design documents to test documents it is used to change tests when related source documents are changed to select test cases for execution when planning for regression tests by considering requirement coverage test case a test case normally consists of a unique identifier requirement references from a design specification preconditions events a series of steps also known as actions to follow input output expected result and the actual result clinically defined a test case is an input and an expected result this can be as terse as for condition x your derived result is y although normally test cases describe in more detail the input scenario and what results might be expected it can occasionally be a series of steps but often steps are contained in a separate test procedure that can be exercised against multiple test cases as a matter of economy but with one expected result or expected outcome the optional fields are a test case id test step or order of execution number related requirements depth test category author and check boxes for whether the test is automatable and has been automated larger test cases may also contain prerequisite states or steps and descriptions a test case should also contain a place for the actual result these steps can be stored in a word processor document spreadsheet database or other common repositories in a database system you may also be able to see past test results who generated the results and what system configuration was used to generate those results these past results would usually be stored in a separate table test script a test script is a procedure or programming code that replicates user actions initially the term was derived from the product of work created by automated regression test tools a test case will be a baseline to create test scripts using a tool or a program test suite the most common term for a collection of test cases is a test suite the test suite often also contains more detailed instructions or goals for each collection of test cases it definitely contains a section where the tester identifies the system configuration used during testing a group of test cases may also contain prerequisite states or steps and descriptions of the following tests test fixture or test data in most cases multiple sets of values or data are used to test the same functionality of a particular feature all the test values and changeable environmental components are collected in separate files and stored as test data it is also useful to provide this data to the client and with the product or a project there are techniques to generate test data test harness the software tools samples of data input and output and configurations are all referred to collectively as a test harness certifications further information certification insoftwaretesting several certification programs exist to support the professional aspirations of software testers and quality assurance specialists note that a few practitioners argue that the testing field is not ready for certification as mentioned in the controversy section testing certifications certified associate in software testing cast offered by the international software certifications board certified manager of software testing cmst offered by the international software certifications board certified software tester cste offered by the international software certifications board isqi certified agile tester cat offered by the international software quality institute istqb certified tester advanced level ctal offered by the international software testing qualifications board istqb certified tester foundation level ctfl offered by the international software testing qualifications board quality assurance certifications certified associate in software quality casq offered by the international software certifications board certified manager of software quality cmsq offered by the international software certifications board certified software quality analyst csqa offered by the international software certifications board certified software quality engineer csqe offered by the american society for quality controversy some of the major software testing controversies include agile vs traditional should testers learn to work under conditions of uncertainty and constant change or should they aim at process maturity the agile testing movement has received growing popularity since 2006 mainly in commercial circles manual testing vs automated some writers believe that test automation is so expensive relative to its value that it should be used sparingly the test automation then can be considered as a way to capture and implement the requirements as a general rule the larger the system and the greater the complexity the greater the roi in test automation also the investment in tools and expertise can be amortized over multiple projects with the right level of knowledge sharing within an organization is the existence of the iso 29119 software testing standard justified significant opposition has formed out of the ranks of the contextdriven school of software testing about the iso 29119 standard professional testing associations such as the international society for software testing have attempted to have the standard withdrawn some practitioners declare that the testing field is not ready for certification no certification now offered actually requires the applicant to show their ability to test software no certification is based on a widely accepted body of knowledge certification itself cannot measure an individuals productivity their skill or practical knowledge and cannot guarantee their competence or professionalism as a tester studies used to show the relative expense of fixing defects there are opposing views on the applicability of studies used to show the relative expense of fixing defects depending on their introduction and detection for example it is commonly believed that the earlier a defect is found the cheaper it is to fix it the following table shows the cost of fixing the defect depending on the stage it was found for example if a problem in the requirements is found only postrelease then it would cost 10100 times more to fix than if it had already been found by the requirements review with the advent of modern continuous deployment practices and cloudbased services the cost of redeployment and maintenance may lessen over time cost to fix a defect time detected requirements architecture construction system test postrelease time introduced requirements 1 3 510 10 10100 architecture 1 10 15 25100 construction 1 10 1025 the data from which this table is extrapolated is scant laurent bossavit says in his analysis the smaller projects curve turns out to be from only two teams of firstyear students a sample size so small that extrapolating to smaller projects in general is totally indefensible the gte study does not explain its data other than to say it came from two projects one large and one small the paper cited for the bell labs safeguard project specifically disclaims having collected the finegrained data that boehms data points suggest the ibm study fagans paper contains claims that seem to contradict boehms graph and no numerical results that clearly correspond to his data points boehm doesnt even cite a paper for the trw data except when writing for making software in 2010 and there he cited the original 1976 article there exists a large study conducted at trw at the right time for boehm to cite it but that paper doesnt contain the sort of data that would support boehms claims related processes software verification and validation verification and validation software and software quality control software testing is used in association with verification and validation verification have we built the software right ie does it implement the requirements validation have we built the right software ie do the deliverables satisfy the customer the terms verification and validation are commonly used interchangeably in the industry it is also common to see these two terms defined with contradictory definitions according to the ieee standard glossary of software engineering terminology verification is the process of evaluating a system or component to determine whether the products of a given development phase satisfy the conditions imposed at the start of that phase validation is the process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of the development process to determine whether it satisfies specified requirements and according to the iso 9000 standard verification is confirmation by examination and through provision of objective evidence that specified requirements have been fulfilled validation is confirmation by examination and through provision of objective evidence that the requirements for a specific intended use or application have been fulfilled the contradiction is caused by the use of the concepts of requirements and specified requirements but with different meanings in the case of ieee standards the specified requirements mentioned in the definition of validation are the set of problems needs and wants of the stakeholders that the software must solve and satisfy such requirements are documented in a software requirements specification srs and the products mentioned in the definition of verification are the output artifacts of every phase of the software development process these products are in fact specifications such as architectural design specification detailed design specification etc the srs is also a specification but it cannot be verified at least not in the sense used here more on this subject below but for the iso 9000 the specified requirements are the set of specifications as just mentioned above that must be verified a specification as previously explained is the product of a software development process phase that receives another specification as input a specification is verified successfully when it correctly implements its input specification all the specifications can be verified except the srs because it is the first one it can be validated though examples the design specification must implement the srs and the construction phase artifacts must implement the design specification so when these words are defined in common terms the apparent contradiction disappears both the srs and the software must be validated the srs can be validated statically by consulting with the stakeholders nevertheless running some partial implementation of the software or a prototype of any kind dynamic testing and obtaining positive feedback from them can further increase the certainty that the srs is correctly formulated on the other hand the software as a final and running product not its artifacts and documents including the source code must be validated dynamically with the stakeholders by executing the software and having them to try it some might argue that for srs the input is the words of stakeholders and therefore srs validation is the same as srs verification thinking this way is not advisable as it only causes more confusion it is better to think of verification as a process involving a formal and technical input document software quality assurance sqa software testing may be considered a part of a software quality assurance sqa process software testing is an activity to investigate software under test in order to provide qualityrelated information to stakeholders by contrast qa quality assurance is the implementation of policies and procedures intended to prevent defects from reaching customers book software testing software testing portal data validation dynamic program analysis formal verification independent test organization manual testing orthogonal array testing pair testing reverse semantic traceability software testing tactics test management tools web testing test data generation meyer bertrand august 2008 seven principles of software testing pdf computer vol41 no8 pp99101 doi101109mc2008306 retrieved november 21 2017 wikimedia commons has media related to software testing at wikiversity you can learn more and teach others about software testing at the department of software testing software testing tools and products at curlie software that makes software better economistcom vtemajor fields of computer sciencenote this template roughly follows the 2012 acm computing classification systemhardware printed circuit board peripheral integrated circuit very large scale integration systems on chip socs energy consumption green computing electronic design automation hardware acceleration computer systemsorganization computer architecture embedded system realtime computing dependability networks network architecture network protocol network components network scheduler network performance evaluation network service software organization interpreter middleware virtual machine operating system software 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validation structured analysis orientations agile aspectoriented object orientation ontology service orientation sdlc modelsdevelopmental agile eup executable uml incremental model iterative model prototype model rad up scrum spiral model vmodel waterfall model xp other spice cmmi data model er model function model information model metamodeling object model systems model view model languages idef uml usl sysml softwareengineers victor basili kent beck grady booch fred brooks barry boehm peter chen danese cooper ward cunningham tom demarco edsger w dijkstra delores m etter martin fowler adele goldstine margaret hamilton c a r hoare lois haibt mary jean harrold grace hopper watts humphrey michael a jackson ivar jacobson alan kay nancy leveson stephen j mellor bertrand meyer david parnas trygve reenskaug winston w royce james rumbaugh mary shaw peri tarr elaine weyuker niklaus wirth edward yourdon related fields computer science computer engineering project management risk management systems engineering category commons software testing portal authority control ndl 01179782 