What is software testing?
Software testing is a series of activities to evaluate a software product or application to ensure that it meets the desired performance level, functionality, and expected customer experience.
Testing must be comprehensive and encompass all aspects of the application from code review, functional, performance, security, regression, integration, unit, and stress, to overall acceptance testing.
Testing is effective when it is continuous, starts when the product is being designed, and continues when it is developed and well into the production stage. Automating the design and deployment of tests is efficient, and effective and delivers more consistent results. It also empowers developers to do things at speed and scale up quickly and easily.
What is the importance of software testing?
Software testing is a crucial part of software development and its significance arises from the following benefits it brings to the development process.
Risk Mitigation: Continuous testing ensures that any defects or shortcomings in the software are discovered at an early stage and rectified and that it delivers the desired objectives.
Enhanced security: Continuous security testing of software identifies security gaps early in the development cycle to plug and strengthen security and increase the reliability of the application.
Enhanced Product Quality: Testing helps to understand whether the product will deliver the required objectives, including the required functionality, performance, and user experience.
User experience: Testing user experience is important to ensure that the product can be easily understood and used and there is adoption amongst the target audience.
Optimization: With time as more users are added and features enhanced, the application performance and user experience get affected, and testing helps to identify the pain points and optimize the product to deliver high satisfaction and customer delight.
What are the goals of software testing?
The primary objective of software testing is the early identification of bugs, defects, and software vulnerabilities and fixing them to reduce the technical debt of the application development.
In addition, testing may be conducted to achieve specific goals such as the following.
Validating Functionality: The software must deliver the intended results, such as a payment portal enabling payment—the software must facilitate a secure and encrypted connection with the bank or the e-wallet of the customer and help to make the transaction. In addition, the software must also send alerts to the payer and the payee that the transaction has been completed. Testing helps to validate that all the steps in the process are tested and are working in a live environment.
Compatibility and design: Another goal of testing is to ensure that the application, such as the payment portal is compatible across all devices, platforms, and browsers. In addition, the architecture and design must ensure that the payment portal is seamlessly integrated with third-party tools and a secure gateway.
Regression testing and Optimization: When a new feature or enhancement is introduced, it is important to test and check that it does not negatively impact existing features and functionality. Testing helps to identify is there is any negative effect on the performance and it can be fixed and optimize to ensure that the application deliver consistent performance.
