Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.” – John Ruskin. Today’s world of technology is completely dominated by machines, and their behavior is controlled by the software powering it. Quality Assurance or Software Testing is crucial because it identifies errors or bugs from a system at the beginning. This article on “Software Testing Strategies” will help you plan your test design in the following sequence :
- Introduction to Software Testing
- Software Testing Strategies
- Factors Affecting Software Testing Strategies
Introduction to Software Testing
Software Testing is a process of evaluating the functionality of a software application to find any software bugs. It checks whether the developed software met the specified requirements and identifies any defect in the software in order to produce a quality product.
This is basically executing a system in order to identify any gaps, errors, or missing requirements contrary to the actual requirements. It is also stated as the process of verifying and validating a software product. With this, you can check whether the software product:
- Meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development
- Works as per the requirement
- Can be implemented with the same characteristics
Software Testing Strategies
An efficient software testing or QA strategy requires testing of all technology stack levels to ensure that every part, as well as the entire system, works without breaking down. Some of the Software Testing Strategies include:
1. Leave time for fixing: Once problems are discovered, it is important to fix the time for the developers to resolve the issues. Also, the company needs time to retest the fixes as well.
2. Discourage passing the buck: If you want to minimize back and forth conversations between developers and testers, you need to develop a culture that will encourage them to hop on the phone or have desk-side chat to get to the bottom of things. Testing and fixing are all about collaboration.
3. Manual testing has to be exploratory: If it is possible to write down or script any issue in exact terms, it could be automated and belongs in the automated test suite. Real-world use of the software will not be scripted and the testers need to break things without a script.
4. Encourage clarity: You need to create a bug report that provides clarity rather than creating any confusion. However, it is also integral for a developer to go out of the way to effectively communicate as well.
5. Test often: This helps in preventing huge backlogs of problems from building up and crushing morale. Frequent testing is considered the best approach.
These are some of the software testing strategies that will help you in running the development process smoothly.
Now let’s move on and have a look at different factors you need to consider while choosing your testing strategy.
Factors affecting Software Testing Strategies
- Risks- Risk management is very important during testing to figure out the risks and the risk level. For example, for an app that is well-established and slowly evolving, regression is a critical risk.
- Objectives- Testing should satisfy the requirements and needs of stakeholders to succeed. The objective is to look for as many defects as possible with less up-front time and effort invested.
- Skills- It is important to consider the skills of the testers since strategies should not only be chosen but executed as well. A standard-compliant strategy is a smart option when lacking skills and time in the team to create an approach.
- Product- Some products have specified requirements. This could lead to synergy with an analytical strategy that is requirements-based.
- Business- Business considerations and strategy are often important. If using a legacy system as a model for a new one, you could use a model-based strategy.
- Regulations- At some instances, one needs to satisfy the regulators along with the stakeholders. In this case, you would need a methodical strategy which satisfies these regulators.
Now with this, we come to an end to this “Software Testing Strategies” blog. I hope you guys enjoyed this article and understood what is software testing and the different testing strategies.
Now that you have understood testing, check out the Software Testing Fundamentals Course by Edureka. This course is designed to introduce you to the complete software testing life-cycle. You will be learning different levels of testing, test environment setup, test case design technique, test data creation, test execution, bug reporting, CI/CD pipeline in DevOps, and other essential concepts of software testing.
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