Testing Process - Steps Involved in Testing an Application

Whether it is waterfall or agile, typically testing starts right after development. If it is waterfall, testing will start after development is complete with coding. Where as in Agile, testing will start with only some x% of development is done. So obviously there's a lot of going back & forth in agile then waterfall. In both cases, to test an application a process needs to be followed. I tried to depict the process that a tester has to follow at different stages of development, in the following diagram.

Types of Testing

There's loads of different types of testing that're currently in use. Depending on the criticality of the application, various types of testing is performed on the application. But they can be classified in to 2 different types:

1. Functional Testing

2. Non-Functional Testing

1. Functional Testing: Testing an application or a system per the given requirements. In functional testing, tester would ensure that application behaves as per the requirements set in the requirement documents (System Req. Document, Software Req. Document, Business Req. Document etc). Functional testing comprises the following types of testing

• Unit Testing: Testing a piece of code. Could be a .net method or a java class or cobol/jcl program
• Integration Testing: Testing a set of programs or physical layers of application. or testing whether 2 or more programs work together or not?
• System Testing: Testing a full system. Here a tester would test all the modules of the system. Tester would make sure if all the programs/ application as a WHOLE works fine
• Regression Testing: Every time a new functionality is added, tester would need to make sure it doesn't effect the existing functionality. This type of testing is called Regression testing
• End-to-End Testing: Testing the full system flow. Meaning, testing from system-A thru system-z
• Ad-hoc Testing: Testing a one-off report or a job
• White box Testing: This is nothing but Unit/ Integration Testing. Testing the actual physical code. This is a developers job to perform white box testing
• Black-box Testing: Testing something without knowing what code lies inside it. This is nothing but System testing. This type of testing is done by QA.
• Accessibility Testing: Testing to make sure if your application is accessible by a variety of people with accessibility problems. Such as, visual impairments/ partially blind/ hearing impairments etc
• GUI Testing: Testing the user interface works per the requirements. This is to make sure things like layouts, forms, form controls, grid objects, buttons, text box, check box, labels etc are intact

2. Non-Functional Testing: Testing an application beyond the functionality. This is to test something other than what is written in the functional specification. This type of testing requires a different mind set to think out of the box as well. Non-Functional testing comprises the following types of testing

• Performance Testing: Testing an application to measure the performance by running scripts. Ex: Win-runner scripts can be created to simulate the transactions performed on an application & run to see the performance of the application meets the requirements set by the business.
• Load Testing: Testing an application to measure the maximum load that it can take. Same as performance testing, an automation engineer would create tests/ scripts to simulate the transactions performed on an application up to a certain level set by the business.
• Stress Testing: Testing an application beyond an operational capacity or level/ limit is called stress testing. Stress testing is mostly done until the application crashing point (or breaking point) to verify the stability of the application
• Fault Tolerance Testing: How an application would survive any real-time faults/ failures that could happen in production. Take database server down, network down, application server is down etc and run them back again to see if the application starts responding soon after the resources are available
• Disaster Recovery Testing: Testing an application's disaster recovery measures. A company may be using a system in India. If an earth quake in an ocean disrupted network, everything should be switched to backup/ contingency line to run business as usual. Testing such backup procedures could be called disaster recovery testing. This usually is a part of Operational testing
• Environment Testing: Testing the full environment where a given application runs. Example is testing - Database (creating, updating, deleting), Application servers (get it down, up, restart), Installing this full environmental changes just by looking at the documentation available etc
• Operational Testing: This is often referred to as Operational readiness testing as well. Testing to make sure everything is ready for operations team. This would include Fault tolerance testing, Disaster recovery testing, Environment testing, Installation testing etc
• Installation Testing: Testing the installation instructions set by the development. Just follow the step-by-step process listed in the documentation and make sure it doesn't miss anything. Every work item or step that need to be performed by a user to install a given application should be documented & well tested

QA Involvement in SDLC

Although QA acts & tries to run fast to complete testing at the very end phase of a development life cycle; QA involves from the beginning. As you can see form the below diagram, QA involves almost from the time when the business requirements are written. QA should provide their valuable input so as to improve the quality of the product. Any risks/ concerns/ suggestions should be raised before hand.

Involving QA from the beginning would give the team to prepare with a mind set that is required to test the product - WHICH IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, that should never be ignored

Testing Concepts - Phases of Development (SDLC)

What is Testing? When & where does testers involve in the whole process of development?

Testing is a verification process where an already developed product will be verified for any defects or faults. Testing is done on a product before its released for use by the customers. Testing is often referred to as "Quality Assurance". Depending on the industry type testing is done in different ways. However I would concentrate only on IT industry, here in this blog.

Tester should have an understanding of what process is followed in the industry & where does QA (Quality Assurance) gets involved in that process. Most industries follow a standard way of development. That standard is called SDLC. It refers to Software Development Life Cycle. You can find many articles on what is SDLC & how it works and so on. I'll try to explain it from a ground level, thinking that the user doesn't have basic understanding of testing process.

In a real world, this is how it works.

1. A shop owner who wants a systemic way of processing transactions in his shop. He knows only the scenarios that he wants to process using a system. Like a customer comes in to a shop, brings in goods, purchases at the till by paying for it using Cash/ CC/ DB/ Account etc

Shop Owner is CLIENT/ CUSTOMER

2. He calls for a tender process for converting these scenarios in to a System. Lets say a Company has been chosen for completing the work

This is Project Initiation - where a budget (estimated), time scale are agreed

3. Business Analysts/ Architects will speak to the customer/ client to get an understanding of all the possible scenarios that would ever occur in the shop. A document is written with all the notes taken from the client.

This is Project Planning

4. This Business requirements document is then used by implementation team to write System (and/or Software) requirements that are low-level requirements, that has information about how does system behave in a scenario given in the business requirements. And also information about how should the programs be written (pseudo programs etc) & how should they communicate to each other, all about integration of different programs/ modules and every little detail about the system

This is Project Design

5. Business, System & Software requirements would become the input for a team of developers, who can write programs to meet the criteria specified in the Design documents

This is called Implementation - as a part of this process developers should also make sure their programs work on their own (by writing unit tests) & work when clubbed together with other programs written by his team members (by writing integration tests)

6. Code is then built in to an exe (or something similar to that) file and given to Q.A. team for further testing & verifying that it works

This is called Verification/ Testing - as a part of this process QA team would test the system in many ways (Ex: End-to-End tests, Functional Tests, Non-Functional Tests, Regression tests, Negative tests, Installation tests, Operational tests etc)

7. If the code is doing what is supposed to do & if QA has certified that by signing off on the developed features of the system, then the system is ready for our shop owner to install & work away

This is called Production/ Release - where the system is handed off to the customer/ client

Below picture gives an understanding of how SDLC is formed from the above scenario.