Introduction
Most of the organization’s tasks and cloud systems run on software. From the smartphones we use to the web applications we enjoy, everything runs on software. Software development companies spend millions of dollars on software development. Among the various phases of software development – planning, requirement analysis, designing, prototyping, development, testing, and deployment, testing is essential. In this article, you will understand software development and its phases.
What is Software testing?
Software testing is the technique that helps in evaluating & validating the software product, it’s working, how it is supposed to operate. Software testers are responsible for preventing the system from bugs, abrupt shutdown of the product, and improve overall performance. That is how software testers could save the day by reducing the development cost & increase the functionality of the software. Organizations and researchers are witnessing outstanding advancements in QA testing. With the introduction of innovative technologies, applications are experiencing new design and deployment techniques that require testing.
Types of Software Testing
There is a wide range of software testing taking place depending on the situation of the software development. These are:
- Unit testing: It is a specific type of software testing where the software tester checks each unit of the software. Units are the tiniest testable component, and software testers check whether the software is performing as per expectation or not.
- Functional testing: In this type of testing, the software tester will emulate the business situation depending on functional requirements. One common approach to performing such tests is via black-box testing.
- Acceptance testing: This testing technique verifies whether the whole system is working as planned or not.
- Regression testing: This testing technique validates whether new features are breaking or degrading the previous functionality or not. One such technique is sanity testing, where software developers check menus, functionalities, and commands when there is limited or no time for a full regression test.
- Performance testing: It is a type of testing that determines how the software will perform under diverse workloads. Load testing is an example that software testers use to check the performance under real-life load conditions.
- Usability testing: This testing technique validates how well your product customer can utilize the system or application for achieving their task.
Software testing tools
Most of the tasks today have gone automated, so has the software testing. Modern software development companies develop tons of software daily, and for this reason, manual testing of software might become a tedious job. That is when software development companies prefer to use new automation tools and frameworks to accomplish those tests. Some of the popular software testing tools are:
- Tricentis Tosca
- Selenium
- IBM Rational Functional Tester
- Ranorex
- Parasoft SOAtest
- SmartBear ReadyAPI
Conclusion
Although manual testing & ad-hoc testing techniques are enough for smaller software builds, large organizations need to have automated software to develop the software faster and reduce time to market. It does not matter whether you are a Quality Assurance testing company or a software development company; your testing team should remain up-to-date with the emerging software testing trends.