What is Software Testing?

What is Software Testing? is quite interesting question. This term software testing getting boom now a days. Many of you might have these questions like what is software testing? , how do they do it? Software testing is really needed? , how they test the software? And many more.

If you googled what is software testing, you might have seen many statement and many definitions like its test technique, its black box, its white box, it’s a process which check completeness,correctness, quality and security etc. these statements,these definitions will not clear the concept of the software testing, especially for those people who want to choose software testing as a career.

So, in this article I will try to clear the concept of software testing, how do they do it and if you are planning to start the career as a software tester. After reading this article you will get clear idea of software testing.

Software testing is done to ensure that all the functionality and the features of the software is working as per the clients requirements in simple word software testing is an activity to check that the software is bug free. For example, there is a person who want its own e-commerce site like amazon, eBay etc. So he will contact any software company and he will explains his all the requirement like he wants customer login, customer can add their favorite product to cart, customer should able to pay via online banking, credit debit card etc.To the software company. So Software Company will write down all clients requirement and according to that requirement Software developer develop the e-commerce site. 

Then that developed software comes to Software Tester who test all the functionalities and feature means software testers ensure that all the functions and feature of software is working fine with all the possible conditions and all the requirement which is given by the client is included in software and working properly.

But the main question is how does the Software Tester test the software? There are different technique, different ways to test the software. Basically Testing starts with understanding the software requirement. First tester understand all the requirement of the software and its output. Then he writes the test cases to test each requirement. For example, suppose one of the requirement of client is, he wants that the customer should able to add product to cart or bucket. So to test this functionality of software tester will write following test cases.

1. Verify ability of user to add the product to cart.
2. Verify the ability of the user to add multiple product to the cart/bucket.
3. Verify the ability of the user to add different product from different categories.
4. Verify the description, price and quantity of added product in the cart
5. User should not be able to add duplicate product in the cart
6. User should able to remove the product from cart
7. User should able the increase quantity of the cart product 
8. And many more

Just imagine to test a single add to cart functionality testers have to write so many test cases. It will help to find all major bugs/ errors present in the software.

You might have one more question in your mind that do software testers have to write test cases all the time. The answer is, it depends on the testing technique they are using. In many testing techniques they have to write the test cases but in Adhoc Testing testers do not need to write the test cases.but to use Adhoc Testing technique tester should have lots of knowledge about the software. This type of testing technique is useful before the releasing of the software.There are almost 150+ software testing techniques present.

There are lots of example available in history which shows the important of proper software testing. Software bugs can cause money loss and even loss of life. some of the incidence is shown below.

NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to an issue in interfaces. The communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion. The issue was Ground based software was producing data in the units of pound-seconds instead of producing data in newton-seconds. The cost of the mission was almost $330 million. This is very huge loss of money which could have been prevented if they had found this bug during testing phase. There are many such a incident happened , one of those is once  Chine Airlines Airbus A300 had crashed on 26 April 1994 due to the software bug which killed 264 peoples present on the plane.

Such an incident shows us that how important Software Testing is. I Hope You liked my article.

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