Software Testing

Introduction Testing is often left to the end of the project which is generally not a good idea. Testing should be conducted throughout the project. A testing plan should be created at the beginning of the project and continuously updated during the duration of the project. At different stages of testing all parts of the system will not be complete, hence stubs my need to be written for these parts.

Stages of Testing Unit testing Integration testing System testing Acceptance testing

Unit Testing There are approaches to unit testing, namely, black-box testing and white-box testing. In black-box testing the tester examines whether each class meets its requirements, i.e. the class is treated as a “black-box”. White-box testing on the other hand, looks at the code in the class to identify errors. The default approach is black-box testing, unless the complexity of the program is high in which case white-box testing is used.

Integration Testing The main of this phase is to test the user interface. The tester moves through each menu in a top-down manner. The use cases are also tested against the menu to ensure that the requirements are met. This phase also involves interaction testing which adds on a class and tests it. If the class meets the requirements the next class is added and so on until the entire system is developed. This testing is then taken from the class to the package level. If the system exchanges data with other systems this is also tested during this phase. Test data is used in conducting these tests.

System Testing Requirements testing Usability testing Security testing Performance testing Documentation testing

Acceptance Testing The testing is done in two phases, namely, alpha testing and beta testing. Alpha testing involves use of the system by the users to ensure that they accept the system. Beta testing uses real data and not test data to identify system errors.