Types of Software Testing — A Brief Guide

Every application or website that you see on your digital screens today once started with a simple idea. A simple idea to bring a product or service to your doorstep led to a series of efforts and processes in software creation.

From requirement analysis to designing, coding, testing, and maintenance, a software development life cycle involves a series of processes.

Though, the error or bugs may disrupt the process in the most inefficient way!

So do you want to write a fabulous error-free code but don’t know how to test it?

If yes, then software testing would be a key step for you to implement. Software testing can define as the process of executing a coding program to locate any errors in it. Every type of software testing has its own spectrum of features and use cases.

In this article, we’ll deep dive into the world of two groups of QA tests- Functional Testing and Non-Functional Testing.

• Functional Testing

There are four types of functional testing that every software developer must know of — Unit testing, Integration testing, System testing, and Acceptance testing.

1. Unit Testing

Testing each software component or module is essential. To test that, developers rely on unit testing.

Developers typically undertake unit testing during the development phase of an application using automation tools like — Xunit, NUnit, and JUnit.

For Example: If you are building a calculator application, then you can undertake the unit test to check whether two numbers can get multiplied easily or not.

Unit testing consists of 2 sub-tests:

• White Box Testing: This technique is used to detect loopholes in an application design.
• Gorilla Testing: This technique is employed to check the strength of your application.

2. Integration Testing

To find any loopholes in the application interface, data flow, and communication, we use integration testing.

A developer groups two or more application modules and tests them as a whole. Two major approaches namely — Top-down and Bottom-up can be used to integrate the application modules you’ve chosen.

For Example: If a user visits a shopping website and likes a dress, they check out its details. Now for the user to complete their purchase, there should be a seamless integration between the shopping website and the payment processing system. This can test by integration testing.

3. System Testing

The testing is suitable for testers and QA professionals!

To test the entire system of the application, you need to outline certain requirements and then proceed with it. It consists of 6 major approaches:

• End-to-End Testing

In this type, you test the entire application system by mimicking a real-world environment.

For Example: Let’s imagine you’re testing a medical insurance website. During end-to-end testing, you’ll need to go through the entire process of purchasing an insurance policy, adding relevant credit card details, your contact information, etc to check the functionality of the program.

• Black Box Testing

When a developer focuses only on the output and the input of the test project, it is known as black box testing.

• Smoke Testing

This test verifies the critical and basic functionalities of the test project. As in the above-stated example, a smoke test will ensure that every function of buying medical insurance is working flawlessly.

• Sanity Testing

If you’ve added any new functions to the program then you need to perform a sanity test to ensure they’re working fine.

• Monkey Testing

As the name suggests, a monkey test checks how the application would work if a literal monkey with zero knowledge of the application puts random inputs and values into the system.

4. Acceptance Testing

To check whether your website is 100% functional and responsive or not, acceptance testing.

It’s the final phase of testing before the software goes to production.

For Example: If a client is testing a shopping website then they’ll likely run through real-time scenarios such as purchasing products, changing payment information, etc. during an alpha-testing.

· Non-Functional Testing

From Security testing to Compatibility testing, non-functional testing is made of several building blocks.

1. Security Testing

A special team performs a security test to check whether any hacker can penetrate the application or not. It helps secure the application from any external and internal threats, checks for the strength of authorization and validates the authentication processes.

2. Performance Testing

It is done with the help of several tools such as LoadRunner, JMeter, etc. Developers perform the performance test to check the response time and the stability of a website through load application.

For Example: Let’s say you’ve built an application that can handle the load of 50 users at a time with a loading time of 1 second. The performance test will use a load of 50 users or less to verify this statistic.

3. Usability Testing

This test verifies the user experience of an application. During this testing, participants expect to try different interfaces of an application and reiterate their user experience.

For Example: Let’s say you’ve built a stock trading application. Then the tester will check for scenarios such as — whether the background of the app is black or not, whether the stock prices are appropriately colored or not, and how easily the app can be scrolled.

4. Compatibility Testing

A compatibility test checks how your created software will behave in different environments, browsers, hardware, etc.

It helps ensure that your software can execute on multiple browsers, databases, and their latest versions.

Conclusion

Enhance business capabilities, improvise customer experience, and build a hallmark product with QA testing!

With over 100 types of software testing to choose from, define your business analytics and outline a system testing program that best suits your needs!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why is QA Software testing important?

QA Software testing services are a cost-effective method to protect your organization from corporate mishappenings due to buggy software. It also helps provide customers with a better user experience.

2. How many types of testing are essential for software building?

As a QA team member, you must undertake unit testing, Integration testing, System testing, and Acceptance testing before the software launch.

3. What are two broad categories of software testing?

Manual and automation testing are two main categories of software testing.

If you are interested in even more software testing-related articles and information from us here at Devstringx, then we have a lot to choose from.

Originally published at https://www.devstringx.com on September 02, 2022