Principles of Software Testing

Principles of Software Testing

Software testing is a technique to improve the quality of software applications. Software testing mainly focuses on deploying a bug-free application into the production environment. Software testing is based on some principles to make testers follow a productive approach.

• Exhaustive Testing is not possible : - Testing an application exhaustively without any prior planning of test scenarios and test cases leads to consuming more time and can become a major reason for bug leakage. The best approach is to test the application is with the combination of positive and negative test cases along with the integration among different modules. In exhaustive testing, a quality engineer got less chance to analyze the expected bug-free behavior of the application.

• Early Testing : - Testing the application from the early stage of requirement analysis is the right approach to maintain the quality of the software from the initial time of development. Early testing prevents to generate any major issues or blockers at the time of deployment. It leads to achieving quality software within time. The involvement of QA engineers from the early stage makes them to understand the application's functional requirements and provides good outcomes from testing.

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• Defect Clustering :- It defines that through the software testing process, most of the bugs are found in a small number of modules. The major reason behind this could be that modules may be complex, require integration of another complex module, the module might be complicated or big. Therefore using the same test cases for these modules will not become able to find bugs. These types of software applications follow the Pareto Principle i.e. 80% of bugs will be found in 20% of the modules.

• Pesticide Paradox : - This principle mainly focuses on having a multiple vision for a module. We can say that using the same test cases from the initial stage of deployment till the final deployment stages is not a suitable approach. As further the newer versions of the application get deployed it starts impacting their previous versions therefore a QA engineer should test multiple scenarios with different sets of data and ensure defect-free communication between modules.

• Testing is context-dependent : - It means that we have multiple applications that have different business objectives and also have differences in functionality, therefore testing of applications with different objectives requires different approaches and techniques, for example Testing a banking website is totally different from testing an e-commerce website.

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• Absence of error is a fallacy :- Suppose an application is tested thoroughly and get fixed by the developers even if no bugs are identified in the application then the application can be said as 99% bug-free. This means if the development is done on the wrong specification then fixing bugs wouldn't help in removing errors.

• Testing shows the presence of defects:- Test engineers test the application to make sure the application is bug-free and defect-free. If the application is tested and the bugs found get fixed by developers then even if the bugs are not identified in a happy flow of application there will always be possibilities that testing the application thoroughly again with other scenarios find new bugs. Hence it is necessary to test the application to remove as many bugs as possible so as to make your application 99% bug-free.