There is no foolproof way to develop software, which is why an important part of software development services is testing to ensure the quality of the end product. If certain modules of the software don’t function or run efficiently or there are bugs in the software, the end product will be faulty and users will run into many issues during usage.
In order to improve the quality and efficiency of the end product, software development solutions focus a lot on software testing. Software Testing Life Cycle or STLC is a phrase often used in software development services provided by companies like CodeLantic.
STLC doesn’t consist of a single task or function that ensures the software meets all its requirements. Instead, STLC consists of a sequence of activities that each have their own objectives and outputs. Since software testing plays such an important role in the work done by software development companies like CodeLantic, improvements are made to the testing methods used.
There are six stages involved in software testing and they are as follows.
This is the initial testing stage in software development solutions where the team will try to understand the requirements related to testing the product or what the testable requirements are. There are four main areas under which the requirements fall; business, architectural and design, system and integration, and entry criteria.
This is the most important or critical area under software testing and evaluates the goal and scope of the project. The main testing types under this stage are unit testing, API testing, integration testing, system testing, install/uninstall testing, and agile testing.
In this stage, the team takes down a detailed record of the test cases which will then be reviewed to identify any drawbacks. A few practices or factors to consider under this stage are that the test case should be simple and transparent, repetition should be avoided, test case IDs should be labeled for easy identification, and assumptions about features and functions shouldn’t be made.
This stage of software testing can be performed independently or in parallel to the test case design and development stage. The software and hardware conditions under which the software is tested are defined in this stage.
This is the stage where the test cases are executed in accordance with the test plans and cases. The test cases which pass are labeled appropriately, while a bug tracking system is used to identify the defect of any failed test cases.
The final stage of software testing done by companies like CodeLantic, test cycle closure involves testing team member meeting and assessing cycle completion standards. Some of the factors taken into consideration here are test coverage, cost, time, quality, and business goals.
With the completion of exit criteria and testing phase, a test report is published, indicating things like test summary, variances, result summary, evaluation, and approval.
Now that a clear picture has been drawn of software testing and the measures taken by companies like CodeLantic, it’s important to look at the best practices and trends of 2019.
If you haven’t heard of shift left and shift right testing, that’s because it’s a relatively new trend in software testing. Traditionally, software developers took the middle path, where testing was done after the building of the software but before it was released for production.
This trend, however, changes the timeline so that testing begins as soon as the code is written (shift left) and continues even when the software is in production (shift right).
While the concept in itself isn’t new, test automation has become the primary end goal for most QA teams. It is thus a practice worth making note of in 2019, along with the fact that the importance of QAOps, like DevOps, has been recognized in recent times.
One of the best practices in software testing in 2019 is the integration of different types of testing. This means that performance testing, security testing, etc. are performed together instead of using different tools for the different types of testing.
Artificial intelligence or AI too, is being applied to software testing and this will definitely improve software development solutions offered by companies like CodeLantic in 2019.