Testing of computer programs

The results from the test execution are recorded and evaluated and any bugs or defects are usually logged into some kind of bug tracking system. Fixed bugs are retested and this cycle continues until the software meets the quality standards criteria for a shippable code. Plan how to test, design the tests, write the tests, execute the tests, find bugs , fix bugs , release software. The standard process of testing tends to run into some problems on Agile teams where new features are being coded and implemented every couple of weeks or so.

Many teams try to either strictly follow the standard testing process or completely throw it out the window instead of working it into the Agile testing lifecycle of software development process. Instead, the focus really has to change to developing the test cases and test scenarios up front , before any code is even written and to shrink the test process into a smaller iteration, just like we do when we develop software in an Agile way.

This just means that we have to chop things up into smaller pieces and have a bit of a tighter feedback loop. Instead of spending a large amount of time up front creating a testing plan for the project and intricately designing test cases, teams have to run the testing process at the feature level. Each feature should be treated like a mini-project and should be tested by a miniature version of the testing process, which begins before any code is even written.

In fact, ideally, the test cases are created before the code is written at all—or at least the test design, then the development of both the code and the test cases can happen simultaneously.

Since new software is released on very short iterations, regression testing becomes more and more important, thus automated testing becomes even more critical.

In my perfect world of Agile testing, automated tests are created before the code to implement the features is actually written—truly test driven development—but, this rarely happens in reality.

What about you, the software developer? What is your role in all this testing stuff? One of the big failings of software development teams is not getting developers involved enough or taking enough ownership for, testing and the quality of their own code.

Instead, you should absolutely make it your responsibility to find and fix the bugs before your code goes into testing. The reason is fairly simple. The further along in the development of software a bug is found, the more expensive it is to fix. If you test your own code thoroughly and find a bug in that code before you check it in and hand it over to QA, you can quickly fix that bug and perhaps it costs an extra hour of time.

A development manager decides that the bug is severe enough for you to work on and the bug is assigned to you. The tester goes back and checks that the bug is actually fixed and marks the defect as resolved. Ok, so by now, hopefully, you have a decent idea of what testing is, the purpose of testing, what kinds of testing can be done and your role in that whole process.

Black-box testing sounds a whole lot like functional testing. Oh, and also the same question for regression testing versus automated testing. Many of these testing terms are basically the same thing. Sometimes I feel like the whole testing profession feels the need to invent a bunch of terminology and add a bunch of complexity to something that is inherently simple.

To address some of the specifics. Black-box and white-box testing just refer to how the functional testing or other testing is done. Are you looking at the code to give you hints about what to test or are you treating the whole thing like a mysterious black box? For automated testing versus regression testing, again, we are dealing with a higher concept and implementation.

Regression testing is the concept. Compare Compare your test results online to spot potential problems. See how your system stacks up Compare to millions of test results From testing an aging laptop, to tuning an overclock - comparison tools and an extensive results database give you the info you need to understand your system's performance.

Accurate tests of your entire computer. Download for Free. An individual can execute all the tests mentioned above, but it will be very expensive and counter-productive to do so.

As humans, we have limited capacity to perform a large number of actions in a repeatable and reliable way. To automate your tests, you will first need to write them programmatically using a testing framework that suits your application. There are many options out there for each language so you might have to do some research and ask developer communities to find out what would be the best framework for you.

When your tests can be executed via script from your terminal, you can have them be automatically executed by a continuous integration server like Bamboo or use a cloud service like Bitbucket Pipelines. These tools will monitor your repositories and execute your test suite whenever new changes are pushed to the main repository.

The more features and improvements go into your code, the more you'll need to test to make sure that all your system works properly. And then for each bug you fix, it would be wise to check that they don't get back in newer releases.

Automation is key to make this possible and writing tests sooner or later will become part of your development workflow. So the question is whether it is still worth doing manual testing? The short answer is yes, and it should be focused on what is called exploratory testing where the goal is to uncover non-obvious errors.

An exploratory testing session should not exceed two hours and need to have a clear scope to help testers focus on a specific area of the software. Once all testers have been briefed, is up to them to try various actions to check how the system behaves. This type of testing is expensive by nature but is quite helpful to uncover UI issues or verify complex user workflows.

It's something especially worth doing whenever a significant new capability is added to your application to help understand how it behaves under edge cases. To finish this guide, it's important to talk about the goal of testing.

While it's important to test that users can use your application I can log in, I can save an object it is equally important to test that your system doesn't break when bad data or unexpected actions are performed.

You need to anticipate what would happen when a user makes a typo, tries to save an incomplete form or uses the wrong API. You need to check if someone can easily compromise data, get access to a resource they're not supposed to.

A good testing suite should try to break your app and help understand its limit. And finally, tests are code too! So don't forget them during code review as they might be the final gate to production. I've been in the software business for 10 years now in various roles from development to product management.

After spending the last 5 years in Atlassian working on Developer Tools I now write about building software. Outside of work I'm sharpening my fathering skills with a wonderful toddler. Continuous delivery Software testing Types of software testing.