Software Testing is the process of evaluation a software product to detect differences between given input and expected output. Testing assesses the quality of the product or project or task. Software testing is a process of Quality Control(QC) that should be done during the development service or process. In other words software testing is a verification and validation process.
- Verification
Verification is the process to make sure the product satisfies the conditions imposed at the start of the development phase. In other words, to make sure the product behaves the way we want it to.
- Validation
Validation is the process to make sure the product satisfies the specified requirements at the end of the development phase. In other words, to make sure the product is built as per customer requirements.
Findings bugs and errors is one part of software testing process, software testing is also responsible for improving the quality of the software and to abide with the compliances, agreed upon.
As humans have a tendency to commit, errors and resulting bugs are needed to be ratified and corrected, some of the errors do not impact much on our day to day life and can be ignored; however some errors are so severe that they can break the whole system or software causing a huge business loss.
In such kind of situations you need to take care that such vulnerabilities are caught well in advance before deploying the system/software in production environment.
There are various types of testing which can be done on the system/software to check its correctness and accuracy, some of them are listed below:
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- Functional Testing
- System Testing
- Regression Testing
- End-end Testing
- Usability Testing
- Load Testing
- Black Box Testing
- White Box Testing
As listed above there are many ways to test your software at various phases in software development process, which one to select depends upon your need.
Testing verifies that the system meets the different requirements including, functional, performance, reliability, security, usability and so on. This verification is done to ensure that we are building the system right.
In addition, testing validates that the system being developed is what the user needs. In essence, validation is performed to ensure that we are building the right system. Apart from helping make decisions, the information from software testing helps with risk management.
Hence, Software Testing is the continuous and mandatory process of Software Quality Control Method which brings along with its number of benefits like Quality, reliability, accuracy, correctness in the end product and so one of the essential processes in software development life cycle.
