Approaches to Software Testing

Many approaches have been defined in literatures. The importance of any approaches depends on the type of the system in which you are testing. Some of the approaches are given below:

Debugging-oriented:

This approach identifies the errors during debugging the program. There is no difference between testing and debugging.

Demonstration-oriented:

The purpose of testing is to show that the software works

. Here most of the time, the software is demonstrated in a normal sequence/flow. All the branches may not be tested. This approach is mainly to satisfy the customer and no value added to the program.

Destruction-oriented:

The purpose of testing is to show the software doesn’t work.

It is a sadistic process, which explains why most people find it difficult. It is difficult to design test cases to test the program.

Evaluation-oriented:

The purpose of testing is to reduce the perceived risk of not working up to an acceptable value.

Prevention-oriented:

It can be viewed as testing is a mental discipline that results in low risk software

. It is always better to forecast the possible errors and rectify it earlier.

In general, program testing is more properly viewed as the destructive process of trying to find the errors(whose presence is assumed) in a program. A successful test case is one that furthers progress in this direction by causing the program to fail. However, one wants to use program testing to establish some degree of confidence that a program does what it is supposed to do and does not do what is not supposed to do, but this purpose is best achieved by a diligent exploration for errors.

Importance of Testing

Testing activity cannot be eliminated in the life cycle as the end product must be bug free and reliable one. Testing is important because:

1. Testing is a critical element of software Quality Assurance
2. Post-release removal of defects is the most expensive
3. Significant portion of life cycle effort expended on testing

In a typical service oriented project, about 20-40% of project effort spent on testing. It is much more in the case of “human-rated” software.

For example, at Microsoft, tester to developer ratio is 1:1 whereas at NASA shuttle development center (SEI Level 5), the ratio is 7:1. This shows that how testing is an integral part of Quality assurance.

6.5

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