Software testing can be an arduous task. What are the benefits of software testing? The cost of finding testers with the expertise needed to properly test software has been rising as well, making software development cost-prohibitive for many people who might want to do the work themselves.

What is software testing?

Software testing is a process in which we verify and validate the quality of the product: the software. It’s not just about “does it work or not?”, but there are other factors to take into account which will affect how an individual user feels about the software. For example, does it behave as expected? Is it intuitive to use? Does it have any bugs that need fixing?

Testing occurs in a variety of stages and in various forms. The idea is to determine whether or not the software performs as well as it should, using a systematic process that involves observations and measurements.

Benefits of Software Testing

• Finding issues with a product before releasing them and then fix them before they become problems for customers.
• Figuring out how to react to the bugs found. This will ensure that all features and functions are fully utilised before they are sent to the customers.
• Presenting the problems and issues found in a way that is easy for users and other teams to understand.
• Testing gives us an opportunity to see if it really meets expectations as a product.
• Testing statistics and metrics can be used to make sure that the software is as good as possible, and if there are any improvements needed, they can be made.

There are many more benefits of software testing, but for now, let’s focus on those.

Imagine releasing buggy software to the public and then having to fix the bugs and paying for it – as compared to fixing the bugs first and then only releasing your application when you are confident that it works as expected after proper testing.

More reasons to test.

• Think about all the time and effort that went into testing the software – how much money did you save by spending that time?
• If there were no issues with your product (and none found) then you simply release it as it is, thus saving money.
• You can also advertise how much your product has been tested, giving the customer assurance that the product is good enough for them to use instead of spending time on a lower quality product.

In software, testing is the analysis and analysis of a crafted software product. Testing consists of different strategies and let’s have a look at some terminologies.

Test Plan – Plan for Test is a document that contains a test plan outline which will help you in planning your test strategy accurately. This document can be reusable and can be modified to test any software. This document consists of various sections such as Test Strategy, Test case, Environment setup, User roles definition and so on.

Test Strategy – a plan for testing a product is a document that contains information required to define the test cases and its details according to the project requirements. This document is used in order to plan the technical aspects of testing including test cases, environment setup, user roles definition and other details which are needed in planning the test strategy for a particular software application.

Environment – Environment is a place where application or software is executed. World Wide Web for example is an environment in which a web service is executed. The standard environment settings define a certain way in which a piece of software should be executed and these settings give an idea about the environment in which the software will run according to the set scope of the particular project.

Test cases – test case is a document which consists of test steps. Testing involves the execution of test cases that are created by developers to ensure that the application satisfies the set requirements. See how to write good test cases.

Test result – Examining Application after execution of Test Cases.

Functionality – This is the feature that the customer uses on the software product for performing certain tasks or services. For example, in an accounting software, one would use invoice functionality but in an eBook reader, you may not use it at all.

These are just a few basic terms, there are many more that a tester can pick up along their career.

Conclusion

The process of Software Testing can be seen as a complicated one, but it is the only way to make sure that the product you are creating will be up to par according to your customers. By creating test cases and testing the application, you are able to ensure that the product is good enough for release.

There are many more aspects of testing that I could go into detail about but I would rather not drag out this article any longer than it already has. I hope that looking at these different areas of software testing will be useful for anyone who wants to become an important part of software development – software testers who contribute widely towards software quality improvement.