Mainframe Coding

What is Software Testing?

              As the name indicates, Testing, I can define it like “Software testing is a process used to identify the correctness, completeness, and quality of developed computer software”. In simple words, “software testing is an activity to check whether the actual results match the expected results and to ensure that the software system is defect free”.

                 Now the issue is, thus software testing is too important? , I can say, YES. It is very much important for maintaining the quality, functionality as per design, etc.  Testing is important because software bugs could be expensive or even dangerous. There are lot of issues from banks before this regarding inaccurate functionality, for us ppl, we will not understand its value but for banks or other financial institutions it will be a very big problem even if a single wrong transaction happened. To avoid all these things, Clients are very careful about testing the software before they will deploy it to production environment.

          Now the question is, what is the purpose of software testing?

                 Testing software is operating the software under controlled conditions, to

(1) verify that it behaves “as specified”;

(2) to detect errors, and

(3) to validate that what has been specified is what the user actually wanted.

1. Verification is the checking or testing of items, including software, for conformance and consistency by evaluating the results against pre-specified requirements.  [Verification: Are we building the system right?]

2. Error Detection: Testing should intentionally attempt to make things go wrong to determine if things happen when they shouldn’t or things don’t happen when they should.

3. Validation looks at the system correctness – i.e. is the process of checking that what has been specified is what the user actually wanted.  [Validation: Are we building the right system?]

In other words, validation checks to see if we are building what the customer wants/needs, and verification checks to see if we are building that system correctly.  Both verification and validation are necessary, but different components of any testing activity.

          I will post more about software testing in next posts