Introduction to software testing

In 2002, a study commissioned by the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded that software errors cost the US economy about $59 billion annually.

Testing is about the most crucial part of software development. You definitely don't want your customers to be the first to report a bug.

Software testing allows you to discover and fix a bug before they get to production. There are different ways to test your applications; you are either testing manually or automated. For this article, we are concerned about manual testing.

Testing your application can be very challenging. Even though it's impossible to figure out all the defects of your application in your test suites, testing your application gives you confidence that your application works really well as expected to a large extent. At least, you can sleep well at night.

For many organizations, all they want is just to push out new product features as soon as possible. Have you worked in an organization where your boss says you need to push out a feature within the next few hours — a timeline you know is not feasible to get this feature ready and error-free? There are many bosses like that.

This puts you in a fix and allows you to write crappy and hacky code that are not testable or predictable.

You are not alone. I've been in this situation as well. Don't be like these bosses, be different, make testing a part of your software development life cycle as it should be.

In this article we'll learn how to test our applications manually and effectively and then in the next article we'll talk about how to automate your testing, the techniques, the tools, and how to get started.

So, let's get started with manual testing.

Table of content

• The objective of testing
• Types of testing

The objective of testing

The objective of testing is to first find defects and to prevent defects before they get to production.

The information you get from testing can help you perform a proper risk assessment that will contribute to allowing you to deliver software that is fault-tolerant, maintainable, and scalable.

Although different testing techniques have different objective the primary objective is to find defects and to fix them as soon as possible as it might become more expensive to fix when found in production.

Types of Testing

Below are a few types of testing techniques that software teams often use;

Functional Testing types include:

• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• System Testing
• Sanity Testing
• Smoke Testing
• Interface Testing
• Regression Testing
• Beta/Acceptance Testing

Non-functional Testing types include:

• Performance Testing
• Load Testing
• Stress Testing
• Volume Testing
• Security Testing
• Compatibility Testing
• Install Testing
• Recovery Testing
• Reliability Testing
• Usability Testing
• Compliance Testing
• Localization Testing You can find more details about these testing techniques here

That's it for now, next article will be focused on Unit Testing with Java and Selenium.

Stay safe.