Published on: March, 2012
- Mobile •
- Testing
Functional Testing By Belatrix Software | Topics: Software Development
The testing phase of software development often gets the short shrift by developers and IT managers. Yet testing is the only way to determine whether an application will function properly before it is deployed. In this whitepaper we offer an overview of the whys and hows of our software testing approach.
Belatrix Software is a leading Software Services Outsourcing company with its main offices and delivery centers based in Mendoza, Argentina and Lima, Peru. We provide Software Development, Quality Assurance, Localization and Graphics Design Services using the “Agile Near-Shore Model”.
Although it doesn’t get a lot of press, testing is arguably the most important phase in any software development project. Testing is the only way to know whether your project or product is destined for success or doomed to failure before it goes live.
Our focused approach to functional testing includes verifying that an application or Web site conforms to specifications and correctly performs all required functions.
Quality Assurance Services: We offer comprehensive testing services to ensure that your product – project, web site or web application – conforms to stated/documented behavior and specifications.
Our team performs tests of your application on all of the relevant operating systems and browser versions. Once a product’s expected functionality has been defined, test cases or test procedures are created to test actual against expected behavior of the program.
The risks of releasing a new product without rigorous QA have greater implications now than ever before because of the change in expectations and demands of the end users. Finding an autonomous QA partner who is independent of the development unit is crucial to the success of a product.
Functional testing examines how your hardware, software, Web site, or internal application executes its requisite functions, and is vital for assuring the quality of released software. It includes testing of user commands, data manipulation, searches, business processes, user screens, and integrations. Validating an application or Web site in this manner ensures conformity to its specifications and the correct performance of all of its functions.
This is executed as a series of tests which validates the products behavior, feature by feature, using a wide range of normal as well as erroneous input data. This can involve testing of the product’s user interface, APIs, database, security, installation, network, etc.
Performing functional testing at the user interface level is crucial as it can reveal many deficiencies not immediately apparent when conducting a source code review. First priority is given to testing the application’s usability rather than the complexity of the application’s internal workings. Regardless of the quality of the underlying code, if the user interface doesn’t work, the result is an inefficient and frustrating experience for the user.
Management is looking to IT to deliver new capabilities, unlock new business opportunities, and deliver competitive advantages through software. This means the addition of more business application development projects with tighter schedules—but not always with more budget or incremental resources.
Automation is essential to improve the speed, accuracy, and flexibility of the software testing process, enabling your company to find and fix more defects earlier.
The benefits of automation are that it:
However, it should be noted that not all tests are meant to be automated but would be better executed manually.
Advantages of manual testing:
Manual testing disadvantages:
To ensure the quality of the applications, we may follow some or all of the following strategies:
The purpose of smoke testing is to validate the build at a high level, in other words to make sure that changes in the code do not destabilize the overall build or cause catastrophic errors. However, it is not meant to be exhaustive Typical characteristics of a smoke test are:
Defect fixing stages include two forms of tests done on the fixed code: confirmation test, to verify the fix and a regression test to ensure that the application of the fix hasn’t broken any existing functionality. The same principle applies when adding a new feature or functionality to the application. A regression test pack thus covers the basic workflow of typical requirement/use case/user story scenarios.
Given the repetitive nature of regression tests, it is advisable to automate regression tests, since:
Selenium, IBM-Rational Functional Tester, MS-Team Foundation Server, HP Mercury, Apodora, Ranorex, Eclipse, Watir, Watin, Paros proxy, Nunit, MS SQL, Jira, Rally, TestLink, Jmeter, Pywinauto, Virtual Machines, WinSCP, XML, XLST, etc.
C#, Java, Python, Silverlight etc.
Belatrix’s Quality Assurance department provides testing and quality assurance services for projects developed internally or by other companies. It also supplies mechanisms to improve existing practices by developing standardized processes for the entire company and by applying lessons learned from ISO™, IQNet standards and CMMI™-SEI.
Belatrix’s QA team specializes in high value-added QA services that would improve the Project process. Because of this we are extremely selective in our recruitment process and only hire top software engineers that have a passion for Quality Assurance.
Some others Testing Strategies we follow are:
We invite you to learn how a relationship with Belatrix will give your company a distinctive advantage through low cost, disciplined, and high quality software development and quality assurance services.