Software testing

Software testing is a critical element of software quality assurance and represents the ultimate process to ensure the correctness of the product. The quality product always enhances the customer confidence in using the product thereby increases the business economics. 

In other words, a good quality product means zero defects, which is derived from a better quality process in testing.

To develop a software product or project, user needs and constraints must be determined and explicitly stated. The development process is broadly classified into two:

1. Product development
2. Project development

Product development is done assuming a wide range of customers and their needs. This type of development involves customers from all domains and collecting requirements from many different environments.

Project Development is done by focusing a particular customer's need, gathering data from his environment and bringing out a valid set of information that will help as a pillar to development process.

Testing the product means adding value to it by raising the quality or reliability of the product. Raising the reliability of the product means finding and removing errors. Hence one should not test a product to show that it works; rather, one should start with the assumption that the program contains errors and then test the program to find as many of the errors as possible

“Testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors ”

Why software Testing?

Software testing helps to deliver quality software products that satisfy user’s requirements, needs and expectations. If done poorly,

1. Defects are found during operation,
2. It results in high maintenance cost and user dissatisfaction
3. It may cause mission failure
4. Impact on operational performance and reliability