What is Testing?

What is Testing?

It’s been several time when I've come across people when they ask me about what is that I do, I told them that I'm into testing and only response what I got from them is “I think that's the most easiest job in the professional world”. So, here we will understand more about what exactly testing is.

Hey friends, and Greetings for the day

Today we are talking about testing. Generally, people have a common intuition that testing is only about writing and executing test cases which is just a myth. We do have a lot of other major activities which takes place as a part of testing life cycle. Not only just executing the test cases to validate the product but there are lot of supporting activities which are being conducted and organized to make sure that we provide a quality product that reaches the market. Until unless we understand the details, we will continue to think that testing is easy.

To begin with testing most of us think we need to know only basic information. Like, what the product is all about or what are the requirements and test it. No, we do have a lot of other factors which a tester needs to understand and follow them strictly. We have different parameters like principles of testing, different techniques, making sure the defects are identified earlier, classifying them, coordinating with developers, making sure all necessary information is available with us, preparing test data, deciding on manual and automation, exploring functional and non-functional testing and many more.

As we just saw a lot of activities here, we realize that testing is not that simple. To begin with, the very first thing is to understand what's the definition of testing. Generally, different people will have different ways to define testing. For example, it is all about defining quality is in the product or finding defects in the product which you're testing, making sure that it is meeting the expectation of the requirements or of the customers. When we get deeper, we understand that these are all part of testing. As the definition varies from organisation to organisation and person to person based on their proficiency. And yes, as they are all different parameters of testing, it actually comprises all of them.

At this point of time we must have a simple definition to testing

    “It's a systematic process of validating certain expectations when we are given with a set of                      requirements.”

The requirement can be anything which was given to you as an expectation or certain criteria which need to be met by the time you release the product. So, it's really important for tester to understand the requirement and make sure that it meets and behaves the same way as it is supposed to be.

Let’s get into details further. What is the objective of testing? A very common thinking is that, testing just has one objective that is to execute the test cases and find defects. So, let’s understand more about it. Testing majorly has four objectives.

• Finding Defects
• Gaining confidence about the quality
• Providing information for decision making
• Preventing defects

1. Finding Defects

The first objective of testing is to find defects in the product. When you say defect, it is just an anomaly or an issue in any product which you analyse and it is not as per the expectation. The core objective of testing is to find as many defects as possible and resolve them before releasing the product.

2. Gaining Confidence about the Quality

Gaining confidence in the product which you're testing is equally important. Being a tester, if you are unable to have your own confidence on the product which you're testing, there is no point in releasing that product to market. How can your end users be satisfied when you are not? A tester gains confidence by preparing and executing efficient tests on the product. So, it is really important for a tester to have a good confidence on the product before the tester can push it to the market.

3. Provide necessary information for decision making

Testing, being the longest phase of the software development lifecycle involves a lot of information to be shared with management. These information are collected to determine necessary measures, control action, future activities, etc. General information gathering includes, how much testing has been done so far and how much more needs to be done. Also, to include, what type of defects you have found, how many defects are still open to be resolved, etc. These details are collected by using metrics with help of a consistent monitoring process.

4. Preventing Defects

Another, major objective of testing is to prevent defect. I hope we all understand that prevention is better than cure. We being a good tester may find a number of defects but probably finding defects and fixing them will take longer and expensive than preventing the defects to happen. Of course, the cost of quality is directly impacted by these factors.

        “A defect which is found later in lifecycle is expensive to fix when compared to earlier”

So, it is important for a tester to get involved in earlier phases in the software development lifecycle to prevent defects as much as possible to avoid propagation.

Here, we understood that how a tester contributes to a product quality and major objectives of testing. There are several other minor objectives as well:

• To evaluate work products such as requirements, user stories, design, and code 
• To verify whether all specified requirements have been fulfilled 
• To validate whether the test object is complete and works as the users and other stakeholders expect
• To reduce the level of risk of inadequate software quality (e.g., previously undetected failures occurring in operation)
• To comply with contractual, legal, or regulatory requirements or standards, and/or to verify the test object’s compliance with such requirements or standards

Hope this information has added a lot of value to your understanding towards testing. We will cover details about the testing in our upcoming blogs.

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