The relationship between the quality of software coding and a company’s development is described in the previous article “Is Good Code Good for Your Company? What factors influence the quality of coding, as discussed? One of them is software testing.
Software testing refers to the identification of the quality of the software through testing, and early detection of the quality of the software. Identify bugs and errors in the software, and verify the suitability of the software for use. Software testing focuses on the components that run a particular part of the software to assess whether that part is functioning properly or meets some basic standards, such as.
– Compliance with software design and development requirements.
– Responding correctly to all types of input.
– To perform the required functions within an acceptable time frame.
– High availability of software features.
– Can be installed and run in the expected environment.
– The overall outcome expected by stakeholders can be achieved.
Theoretically, there are endless possible tests for each software component, but resources are not unlimited…. In practice, software testing tends to make strategic use of the time and resources available to select more valuable and feasible tests. This will allow you to try to run the software and find out what is wrong with the program.
Many software companies employ a Quality Assurance (QA) specialist. In the past, a series of manual tests were carried out by the staff of the company before the launch of the software. However, this more traditional testing method often has many problems.
Firstly, if the software is large in scale, the developer has to put in more human resources to conduct faster and more comprehensive testing; and when every program error is found, the quality assurance and development staff have to review them one by one.
Secondly, every major software update must be thoroughly tested to ensure that the software is not inaccurate due to coding changes during the update period, which often results in a time-consuming release of the new version.
In recent years, the advent of DevOps has attempted to solve the problem of redundant QA processes. In a DevOps environment, developers (Dev), technical operations (Ops), and quality assurance do not work separately. DevOps hopes that by adopting Agile, it will be able to create a more efficient and more effective way to deliver its services. It is designed to reduce the scope of changes per code-out so that each deployment does not have a significant impact on the software production system. The software grows at a smooth rate. Developers also use a variety of automated tests to support Continuous delivery. (abbreviation for CD) and Continuous integration (abbreviation for (CI), which ensures that the software itself is not affected by coding changes, while spreading out the tedious and repetitive work of QA and reducing the number of QA tasks per deployment. Mistake.
The following three types of tests are automatic test modes that are often utilized in software development.
Unit test: Unit test is to test the components of the software, the purpose of which is to check whether the basic unit of the software is functioning normally.
Integration test: Integration test is to assemble the program module with appropriate integration, and test the interface and function of the integrated system, the purpose is to check whether the interface between the software units is functioning normally.
Functional test: Functional test is a test of the software function, the purpose of which is to check whether the software works normally and whether the business requirements are realized.
The advantage of a functional test is that it can detect problems at an early stage of development. It can isolate the component it is targeting from the entire software architecture and provide rigorous testing to ensure that the component is functioning properly. With unit testing, developers are able to automatically test the basic functionality of each unit at the coding level without the need for quality assurance. Personnel personally inspect the components.
Based on this bottom-up structure, each component has been unit tested, and the system is able to focus on checking that the components are working properly through integration testing, while functional testing focuses on testing the software at the user’s level to see if it conforms to the original software design, while ensuring effective integration between components.
Each of the three types of testing is required at different times in the development process.
When software is being developed, testing is mainly used for unit testing in order to work with the developers and get feedback from the system as soon as possible.
In the preparation environment, this phase detects problems and stops the software deployment if they occur. All tests usually comply with this phase.
In a production environment, we mainly run faster functional tests such as smoke tests, which extensively cover the main functions of the test software in a limited time.
Therefore, we can say that although the time spent on writing tests is not short, but for continuous development, it can prevent problems caused by coding changes, reduce long-term technical debt, speed up development, and greatly reduce development costs.
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