What is Testing?

To make it simple, testing is finding out how well something works.

However, the process comprises a group of techniques to determine the correctness of the application under a script or manual test directly on the user interface. The aim is to detect failures in the application, including bugs and performance issues, so that they can be corrected.

Most of the time, testing is done by comparing the software requirements to the actual software product. If one of the requirements is to make sure that an input only accepts numbers and not characters or files, a test will be conducted to check whether the input has a validation system to reject non-number values in the input.

However, testing also involves an examination of code and the execution of code in various environments and conditions.

What is software testing?

Software testing is the process of examining the behavior of the software under test for validation or verification. It considers the attributes of reliability, scalability, reusability, and usability to evaluate the execution of the software components (servers, database, application, and so on) and find software bugs, errors, or defects.

Software testing has a lot of benefits, some of which are as follows:

• Cost-effectiveness: Testing any software project helps the business save money in the long run. As the process helps detect bugs and check whether newly added features are working in the system without breaking things, it’s a great technical debt reducer.

• Security: If testing is done well, it can be a quick way to detect security risks and problems at an early stage before deploying a product to the whole world.

• Product quality: Testing helps with performance measurement, making sure that the requirements are respected.

Why is software testing important?

Testing your software is important because it helps reduce the impact of bugs through bug identification and resolution. Some bugs can be quite dangerous and can lead to financial losses or endanger human life. Here are some historical examples:

• In April 1999, $1.2 billion was lost due to the failure of a military satellite launch. To date, this is the costliest accident in the history of the world.

• In 2014, Nissan recalled over 1 million cars from the market because of a software failure in the airbag sensory detectors.

• In 2014, some of Amazon’s third-party retailers lost a lot of money because of a software glitch. The bug affected the price of the products, reducing them to 1p.

• In 2015, a software failure in the point of sales (POS) system of Starbucks stores caused the temporary closure of more than 60% of their stores in the US and Canada.

• In 2015, an F-35 fighter plane fell victim to a software bug, which prevented it from detecting or identifying targets correctly. The sensor on the plane was unable to identify threats even from their own planes.

• In 2016, Google reported a bug affecting Windows 10 machines. The vulnerability allowed users to escape security sandboxes through a flow in the win32k system.

What are the various types of testing?

Testing is typically classified into three categories:

• Functional testing: This type of testing comprises unit, integration, user acceptance, globalization, internationalization testing, and so on.

• Non-functional testing: This type of testing checks for factors such as performance, volume, scalability, usability, and load.

• Maintenance testing: This type of testing considers regression and maintenance.