Software Testing Principles
Software testing is a procedure of implementing software or application to identify defects or bugs. For testing an application or software, we need to follow 7 software testing principles to make our product defects or bug-free.
What are the 7 Software Testing Principles?
Let us see the 7 Software Testing Principles, one by one:
- Software Testing shows the presence of defects
- Exhaustive Software Testing is not possible
- Early Software Testing
- Defect Clustering
- Pesticide Paradox
- Software Testing is context-dependent
- Absence of errors fallacy
Software Testing Principles 1. Software Testing Shows The Presence of Defects
The software test engineer will test the software to make sure that the software is bug or defects free. While doing software testing, we can only identify that the software has any errors. The primary purpose of doing software testing is to identify the number of unknown bugs with the help of various methods and software testing techniques because the entire test should be traceable to the customer requirement, which means that to find any defects that might cause the product fails to meet the customer’s needs.
By doing software testing on any software, we can decrease the number of bugs, which does not mean that the software is bug-free because sometimes the software seems to be bug-free while performing multiple types of software testing on it. But at the time of deployment in the production server, if the end-user encounters those bugs which are not found in the software testing process.
Software Testing Principles 2. Exhaustive Software Testing is not possible
Sometimes it seems to be very hard to test all the modules and their features with effective and non-effective combinations of the input data throughout the actual software testing process because of cost and budget.
Hence, instead of performing exhaustive software testing as it takes boundless determinations and most of the hard work is unsuccessful. So we can complete this type of variation according to the importance of the modules because the product timelines will not permit us to perform such type of software testing scenarios.
Software Testing Principles 3. Early Software Testing
Here early software testing means that all the software testing activities should start in the early stages of the software development life cycle i.e. from the requirement analysis stage to identify the defects because if we find the bugs at an early stage, they will be fixed in the initial stage itself, which may cost us very less as compared to those which are identified in the future phase of the software testing process.
To perform software testing, we will require the requirement specification documents; therefore, if the requirements are defined incorrectly, then they can be fixed directly rather than fixing them in another stage, which could be the development phase.
Software Testing Principles 4. Defect clustering
Defect clustering defined that throughout the software testing process, we can detect the number of bugs that are correlated to a small number of modules. We have various reasons for this, such as the modules could be complicated; the coding part may be complex, and so on.
With the help of this, we can find the uncertain modules, but this method has its difficulties if the same tests are performed regularly, hence the same test will not be able to identify the new defects.
Software Testing Principles 5. Pesticide paradox
This software testing principle defined that if we are executing the same set of test cases again and again over a particular time, then these kinds of tests will not be able to find the new bugs in the software. To get over these pesticide paradoxes, it is very significant to review all the test cases frequently. And the new and different tests are necessary to be written for the implementation of multiple parts of the software, which helps us to find more bugs.
Software Testing Principles 6. Software Testing is context-dependent
Software testing is context-dependent principle states that we have multiple fields such as e-commerce websites, commercial websites, and so on available in the market. There is a definite way to test the commercial site as well as the e-commerce websites because every software has its own needs, features, and functionality. To check this type of software, we will take the help of various kinds of testing, different technique, approaches, and multiple methods. Therefore, software testing depends on the context of the software.
Software Testing Principles 7. Absence of errors fallacy
Once the software is completely tested and there are no bugs identified before the release, so we can say that the software is 99 percent bug-free. But there is the chance when the software is tested beside the incorrect requirements, identified the flaws, and fixed in a given period would not help as testing is done on the wrong specification, which does not apply to the customer’s requirements. The absence of error fallacy means identifying and fixing the bugs would not help if the software is impractical and not able to accomplish the customer’s requirements and needs.