Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under

test. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include, but are not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs (errors or other defects). Software testing can be stated as the process of validating and verifying that a software program/application/product: 1. 2. 3. meets the requirements that guided its design and development; works as expected; and can be implemented with the same characteristics.

Software testing, depending on the testing method employed, can be implemented at any time in the development process. However, most of the test effort occurs after the requirements have been defined and the coding process has been completed. As such, the methodology of the test is governed by the software development methodology adopted. Different software development models will focus the test effort at different points in the development process. Newer development models, such as Agile, often employ test driven development and place an increased portion of the testing in the hands of the developer, before it reaches a formal team of testers. In a more traditional model, most of the test execution occurs after the requirements have been defined and the coding process has been completed.

Testing levels Tests are frequently grouped by where they are added in the software development process, or by the level of specificity of the test. The main levels during the development process as defined by the SWEBOK guide are unit-, integration-, and system testing that are distinguished by the test target without implying a specific process model.Other test levels are classified by the testing objective. Test target Unit testing Main article: Unit testing Unit testing, also known as component testing, refers to tests that verify the functionality of a specific section of code, usually at the function level. In an objectoriented environment, this is usually at the class level, and the minimal unit tests include the constructors and destructors. These types of tests are usually written by developers as they work on code (whitebox style), to ensure that the specific function is working as expected. One function

might have multiple tests, to catch corner cases or other branches in the code. Unit testing alone cannot verify the functionality of a piece of software, but rather is used to assure that the building blocks the software uses work independently of each other. Integration testing Main article: Integration testing Integration testing is any type of software testing that seeks to verify the interfaces between components against a software design. Software components may be integrated in an iterative way or all together ("big bang"). Normally the former is considered a better practice since it allows interface issues to be localized more quickly and fixed. Integration testing works to expose defects in the interfaces and interaction between integrated components (modules). Progressively larger groups of tested software components corresponding to elements of the architectural design are integrated and tested until the software works as a system. System testing Main article: System testing System testing tests a completely integrated system to verify that it meets its requirements. System integration testing Main article: System integration testing System integration testing verifies that a system is integrated to any external or third-party systems defined in the system requirements. Objectives of testing Regression testing Main article: Regression testing Regression testing focuses on finding defects after a major code change has occurred. Specifically, it seeks to uncover software regressions, or old bugs that have come back. Such regressions occur whenever software functionality that was previously working correctly stops working as intended. Typically, regressions occur as an unintended of program changes, when the newly developed part of the software collides with the previously existing code. Common methods of regression testing include re-running previously run tests and checking whether previously fixed faults have re-emerged. The depth of testing depends on the phase in the release process and the risk of the added features. They can either be complete, for changes added late in the release or deemed to be risky, to very shallow, consisting of positive tests on each feature, if the changes are early in the release or deemed to be of low risk. Acceptance testing Main article: Acceptance testing

Acceptance testing can mean one of two things:

1.

A smoke test is used as an acceptance test prior to introducing a new build to the main testing process, i.e. before integration or regression. 2. Acceptance testing performed by the customer, often in their lab environment on their own hardware, is known as user acceptance testing (UAT). Acceptance testing may be performed as part of the hand-off process between any two phases of development. Alpha testing Alpha testing is simulated or actual operational testing by potential users/customers or an independent test team at the developers' site. Alpha testing is often employed for off-the-shelf software as a form of internal acceptance testing, before the software goes to beta testing. Beta testing Beta testing comes after alpha testing and can be considered a form of external user acceptance testing. Versions of the software, known as beta versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team. The software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs. Sometimes, beta versions are made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users. Non-functional testing Special methods exist to test non-functional aspects of software. In contrast to functional testing, which establishes the correct operation of the software (correct in that it matches the expected behavior defined in the design requirements), nonfunctional testing verifies that the software functions properly even when it receives invalid or unexpected inputs. Software fault injection, in the form of fuzzing, is an example of non-functional testing. Non-functional testing, especially for software, is designed to establish whether the device under test can tolerate invalid or unexpected inputs, thereby establishing the robustness of input validation routines as well as error-management routines. Various commercial non-functional testing tools are linked from the software fault injection page; there are also numerous open-source and free software tools available that perform non-functional testing. Software performance testing and load testing Performance testing is executed to determine how fast a system or sub-system performs under a particular workload. It can also serve to validate and verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage. Load testing is primarily concerned with testing that can continue to operate under a specific load, whether that be large quantities of data or a large number of users. This is generally referred to as software scalability. The related load testing activity of when performed as a non-functional activity is often referred to as endurance testing.

Volume testing is a way to test functionality. Stress testing is a way to test reliability. Load testing is a way to test performance. There is little agreement on what the specific goals of load testing are. The terms load testing, performance testing, reliability testing, and volume testing, are often used interchangeably. Stability testing Stability testing checks to see if the software can continuously function well in or above an acceptable period. This activity of non-functional software testing is often referred to as load (or endurance) testing. Usability testing Usability testing is needed to check if the user interface is easy to use and understand. It is concerned mainly with the use of the application. Security testing Security testing is essential for software that processes confidential data to prevent system intrusion by hackers. Internationalization and localization The general ability of software to be internationalized and localized can be automatically tested without actual translation, by using pseudolocalization. It will verify that the application still works, even after it has been translated into a new language or adapted for a new culture (such as different currencies or time zones). Actual translation to human languages must be tested, too. Possible localization failures include: Software is often localized by translating a list of strings out of context, and the translator may choose the wrong translation for an ambiguous source string. Technical terminology may become inconsistent if the project is translated by several people without proper coordination or if the translator is imprudent. Literal word-for-word translations may sound inappropriate, artificial or too technical in the target language. Untranslated messages in the original language may be left hard coded in the source code. Some messages may be created automatically at run time and the resulting string may be ungrammatical, functionally incorrect, misleading or confusing. Software may use a keyboard shortcut which has no function on the source language's keyboard layout, but is used for typing characters in the layout of the target language. Software may lack support for the character encoding of the target language. Fonts and font sizes which are appropriate in the source language, may be inappropriate in the target language; for example, CJK characters may become unreadable if the font is too small.

 A string in the target language may be longer than the software can handle. This may make the string partly invisible to the user or cause the software to crash or malfunction. Software may lack proper support for reading or writing bi-directional text. Software may display images with text that wasn't localized.

Localized operating systems may have differently-named system configuration files and environment variables and different formats for date and currency. To avoid these and other localization problems, a tester who knows the target language must run the program with all the possible use cases for translation to see if the messages are readable, translated correctly in context and don't cause failures. Destructive testing Main article: Destructive testing Destructive testing attempts to cause the software or a sub-system to fail, in order to test its robustness. The testing process Traditional CMMI or waterfall development model A common practice of software testing is that testing is performed by an independent group of testers after the functionality is developed, before it is shipped to the customer. This practice often results in the testing phase being used as a project buffer to compensate for project delays, thereby compromising the time devoted to testing. Another practice is to start software testing at the same moment the project starts and it is a continuous process until the project finishes. Further information: Capability Maturity Model Integration and Waterfall model Agile or Extreme development model In contrast, some emerging software disciplines such as extreme programming and the agile software development movement, adhere to a "test-driven software development" model. In this process, unit tests are written first, by the software engineers (often with pair programming in the extreme programming methodology). Of course these tests fail initially; as they are expected to. Then as code is written it passes incrementally larger portions of the test suites. The test suites are continuously updated as new failure conditions and corner cases are discovered, and they are integrated with any regression tests that are developed. Unit tests are maintained along with the rest of the software source code and generally integrated into the build process (with inherently interactive tests being relegated to a partially manual build acceptance process). The ultimate goal of this test process is to achieve continuous deployment where software updates can be published to the public frequently.

A sample testing cycle Although variations exist between organizations, there is a typical cycle for testing. The sample below is common among organizations employing the Waterfall development model. Requirements analysis: Testing should begin in the requirements phase of the software development life cycle. During the design phase, testers work with developers in determining what aspects of a design are testable and with what parameters those tests work. Test planning: Test strategy, test plan, testbed creation. Since many activities will be carried out during testing, a plan is needed. Test development: Test procedures, test scenarios, test cases, test datasets, test scripts to use in testing software. Test execution: Testers execute the software based on the plans and test documents then report any errors found to the development team. Test reporting: Once testing is completed, testers generate metrics and make final reports on their test effort and whether or not the software tested is ready for release. Test result analysis: Or Defect Analysis, is done by the development team usually along with the client, in order to decide what defects should be assigned, fixed, rejected (i.e. found software working properly) or deferred to be dealt with later. Defect Retesting: Once a defect has been dealt with by the development team, it is retested by the testing team. AKA Resolution testing. Regression testing: It is common to have a small test program built of a subset of tests, for each integration of new, modified, or fixed software, in order to ensure that the latest delivery has not ruined anything, and that the software product as a whole is still working correctly. Test Closure: Once the test meets the exit criteria, the activities such as capturing the key outputs, lessons learned, results, logs, documents related to the project are archived and used as a reference for future projects. Automated testing Main article: Test automation Many programming groups are relying more and more on automated testing, especially groups that use test-driven development. There are many frameworks to write tests in, and continuous integration software will run tests automatically every time code is checked into a version control system. While automation cannot reproduce everything that a human can do (and all the ways they think of doing it), it can be very useful for regression testing. However, it does require a well-developed test suite of testing scripts in order to be truly useful.

Testing tools Program testing and fault detection can be aided significantly by testing tools and debuggers. Testing/debug tools include features such as: Program monitors, permitting full or partial monitoring of program code including: Instruction set simulator, permitting complete instruction level

monitoring and trace facilities Program animation, permitting step-by-step execution and

conditional breakpoint at source level or in machine code Code coverage reports Formatted dump or symbolic debugging, tools allowing inspection of program variables on error or at chosen points Automated functional GUI testing tools are used to repeat system-level tests through the GUI Benchmarks, allowing run-time performance comparisons to be made Performance analysis (or profiling tools) that can help to highlight hot spots and resource usage Some of these features may be incorporated into an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). A regression testing technique is to have a standard set of tests, which cover existing functionality that result in persistent tabular data, and to compare prechange data to post-change data, where there should not be differences, using a tool like diffkit. Differences detected indicate unexpected functionality changes or "regression". Measurement in software testing Usually, quality is constrained to such topics as correctness, completeness, security, but can also include more technical requirements as described under the ISO standard ISO/IEC 9126, such as capability, reliability, efficiency, portability, maintainability, compatibility, and usability. There are a number of frequently-used software measures, often called metrics, which are used to assist in determining the state of the software or the adequacy of the testing. Testing artifacts The software testing process can produce several artifacts.

Test plan A test specification is called a test plan. The developers are well aware what test plans will be executed and this information is made available to management and the developers. The idea is to make them more cautious when developing their code or making additional changes. Some companies have a higher-level document called atest strategy. Traceability matrix A traceability matrix is a table that correlates requirements or design documents to test documents. It is used to change tests when related source documents are changed, to select test cases for execution when planning for regression tests by considering requirement coverage. Test case A test case normally consists of a unique identifier, requirement references from a design specification, preconditions, events, a series of steps (also known as actions) to follow, input, output, expected result, and actual result. Clinically defined a test case is an input and an expected result.[41] This can be as pragmatic as 'for condition x your derived result is y', whereas other test cases described in more detail the input scenario and what results might be expected. It can occasionally be a series of steps (but often steps are contained in a separate test procedure that can be exercised against multiple test cases, as a matter of economy) but with one expected result or expected outcome. The optional fields are a test case ID, test step, or order of execution number, related requirement(s), depth, test category, author, and check boxes for whether the test is automatable and has been automated. Larger test cases may also contain prerequisite states or steps, and descriptions. A test case should also contain a place for the actual result. These steps can be stored in a word processor document, spreadsheet, database, or other common repository. In a database system, you may also be able to see past test results, who generated the results, and what system configuration was used to generate those results. These past results would usually be stored in a separate table. Test script

A test script is a procedure, or programing code that replicates user actions. Initially the term was derived from the product of work created by automated regression test tools. Test Case will be a baseline to create test scripts using a tool or a program. Test suite The most common term for a collection of test cases is a test suite. The test suite often also contains more detailed instructions or goals for each collection of test cases. It definitely contains a section where the tester identifies the system configuration used during testing. A group of test cases may also contain prerequisite states or steps, and descriptions of the following tests. Test data In most cases, multiple sets of values or data are used to test the same functionality of a particular feature. All the test values and changeable environmental components are collected in separate files and stored as test data. It is also useful to provide this data to the client and with the product or a project. Test harness The software, tools, samples of data input and output, and configurations are all referred to collectively as a test harness. Certifications Several certification programs exist to support the professional aspirations of software testers and quality assurance specialists. No certification currently offered actually requires the applicant to demonstrate the ability to test software. No certification is based on a widely accepted body of knowledge. This has led some to declare that the testing field is not ready for certification. Certification itself cannot measure an individual's productivity, their skill, or practical knowledge, and cannot guarantee their competence, or professionalism as a tester. Software testing certification types Exam-based: Formalized exams, which need to be passed; can also be

learned by self-study [e.g., for ISTQB or QAI] Education-based: Instructor-led sessions, where each course has to be

passed [e.g., International Institute for Software Testing (IIST)].

Testing certifications Certified Associate in Software Testing (CAST) offered by the QAI CATe offered by the International Institute for Software Testing Certified Manager in Software Testing (CMST) offered by the QAI Certified Software Tester (CSTE) offered by the Quality Assurance

Institute (QAI) Certified Software Test Professional (CSTP) offered by

the International Institute for Software Testing CSTP (TM) (Australian Version) offered by K. J. Ross & Associates ISEB offered by the Information Systems Examinations Board ISTQB Certified Tester, Foundation Level (CTFL) offered by

the International Software Testing Qualification Board ISTQB Certified Tester, Advanced Level (CTAL) offered by

the International Software Testing Qualification Board TMPF TMap Next Foundation offered by the Examination Institute for

Information Science TMPA TMap Next Advanced offered by the Examination Institute for

Information Science Quality assurance certifications CMSQ offered by the Quality Assurance Institute (QAI). CSQA offered by the Quality Assurance Institute (QAI) CSQE offered by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) CQIA offered by the American Society for Quality (ASQ)