Software testing is the process of evaluating and verifying that a software product or application does what it is supposed to do. The benefits of testing include preventing bugs, reducing development costs and improving performance.
There are many different types of software tests, each with specific objectives and strategies:
- Acceptance testing: Verifying whether the whole system works as intended.
- Integration testing: Ensuring that software components or functions operate together.
- Unit testing: Validating that each software unit performs as expected. A unit is the smallest testable component of an application.
- Functional testing: Checking functions by emulating business scenarios, based on functional requirements. Black-box testing is a common way to verify functions.
- Performance testing: Testing how the software performs under different workloads. Load testing, for example, is used to evaluate performance under real-life load conditions.
- Regression testing: Checking whether new features break or degrade functionality. Sanity testing can be used to verify menus, functions and commands at the surface level, when there is no time for a full regression test.
- Stress testing: Testing how much strain the system can take before it fails. Considered to be a type of non-functional testing.
- Usability testing: Validating how well a customer can use a system or web application to complete a task.
In each case, validating base requirements is a critical assessment. Just as important, exploratory testing helps a tester or testing team uncover hard-to-predict scenarios and situations that can lead to software errors.
Even a simple application can be subject to a large number and variety of tests. A test management plan helps to prioritize which types of testing provide the most value – given available time and resources. Testing effectiveness is optimized by running the fewest number of tests to find the largest number of defects.
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