Software testing
Based on the criteria for measuring correctness from an oracle, software testing employs principles and mechanisms that might recognize a problem.
[9][dubious – discuss] Outsourcing software testing because of costs is very common, with China, the Philippines, and India being preferred destinations.
"[10]: 16 ), it illustrated the desire of the software engineering community to separate fundamental development activities, such as debugging, from that of verification.
[11]: 31 Bugs generally slow testing progress and involve programmer assistance to debug and fix.
A hybrid approach called grey-box that includes aspects of both boxes may also be applied to software testing methodology.
Though this method of test design can uncover many errors or problems, it might not detect unimplemented parts of the specification or missing requirements.
Output videos are supplemented by real-time tester input via picture-in-a-picture webcam and audio commentary from microphones.
The quality of communication is increased drastically because testers can show the problem (and the events leading up to it) to the developer as opposed to just describing it, and the need to replicate test failures will cease to exist in many cases.
"[47] Grey-box testing may also include reverse engineering (using dynamic code analysis) to determine, for instance, boundary values or error messages.
Typically, a grey-box tester will be permitted to set up an isolated testing environment with activities, such as seeding a database.
For example, in the case of a lack of backward compatibility, this can occur because the programmers develop and test software only on the latest version of the target environment, which not all users may be running.
Sometimes such issues can be fixed by proactively abstracting operating system functionality into a separate program module or library.
Smoke testing consists of minimal attempts to operate the software, designed to determine whether there are any basic problems that will prevent it from working at all.
Specifically, it seeks to uncover software regressions, as degraded or lost features, including old bugs that have come back.
Typically, regressions occur as an unintended consequence of program changes, when the newly developed part of the software collides with the previously existing code.
This type of testing focuses on the operational readiness of the system to be supported, or to become part of the production environment.
Non-functional testing refers to aspects of the software that may not be related to a specific function or user action, such as scalability or other performance, behavior under certain constraints, or security.
It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.
This is not a kind of testing that can be automated; actual human users are needed, being monitored by skilled UI designers.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines this as a "type of testing conducted to evaluate the degree to which a test item, and associated data and information, are protected so that unauthorised persons or systems cannot use, read or modify them, and authorized persons or systems are not denied access to them.
A/B testing is a method of running a controlled experiment to determine if a proposed change is more effective than the current approach.
In the case of IEEE standards, the specified requirements, mentioned in the definition of validation, are the set of problems, needs and wants of the stakeholders that the software must solve and satisfy.
Nevertheless, running some partial implementation of the software or a prototype of any kind (dynamic testing) and obtaining positive feedback from them, can further increase the certainty that the SRS is correctly formulated.
By contrast, QA (quality assurance) is the implementation of policies and procedures intended to prevent defects from reaching customers.
Quality measures include such topics as correctness, completeness, security and ISO/IEC 9126 requirements such as capability, reliability, efficiency, portability, maintainability, compatibility, and usability.
The software, tools, samples of data input and output, and configurations are all referred to collectively as a test harness.
Several certification programs exist to support the professional aspirations of software testers and quality assurance specialists.
Some of the major software testing controversies include: It is commonly believed that the earlier a defect is found, the cheaper it is to fix it.
With the advent of modern continuous deployment practices and cloud-based services, the cost of re-deployment and maintenance may lessen over time.
The IBM study (Fagan's paper) contains claims that seem to contradict Boehm's graph and no numerical results that clearly correspond to his data points.
