Mumbai University > Information Technology > Sem 8 > Software Testing and Quality Assurance

Marks: 5M

Software Testing Life Cycle is a process that consist of all test life cycle activities like static and dynamic testing concerned with planning, preparation and evaluation of software products to determine that the software products satisfy customer needs and are fit for customer's use.

Software testing is done to find software defects and failures in advance.

Testing activity aims at evaluating an attribute or capability of a program or system and determining that it meets its requirement results.

The process of testing a software is a well planned systematic way is known as software testing life cycle (STLC).

Generic Software Testing Life Cycle consists following phases:

Requirement Analysis

In this phase, testers analyze the customer requirements and work with developers during the design phase to see which requirements are testable and how they are going to test those requirements.

It is very important to start testing activities from the requirement phase itself because the cost of fixing defect is very less if it is found in requirements phase rather than in future phases.

Test Planning

In this phase all the planning about testing is done like what needs to be tested, how the testing will be done, test strategy to be followed, what will be the test environment, what test methodologies will be followed, hardware and software methodologies will be followed, hardware and software availability, resources and risks, etc.

IEEE 829 is test plan is used for test planning.

Test Case Development

1. Test analysis:

   After test planning is over test analysis phase starts, in this phase we need to dig deeper into project and figure out what testing needs to be carried out in each SDLC phase.

   Automation activities are also decided in this phase, if automation needs to be done, how much time will it take to automate and which features need to be automated.

2. Test Design:

   In this phase various black box and white box testing designs are used to design the test cases for testing, testers start writing test cases by following those design techniques.

   If automation testing needs to be done then even automation scripts need to be written in this phase.

Environment Setup

1. Test Construction and Verification:

   In this case testers prepare more test cases by keeping in mind the positive and negative scenarios, end users scenarios, etc.

   All test cases and automation scripts needs to be completed in this phase and got reviewed by stakeholders. Test document plan should be finalized and must be verified by the reviewers.

Test Execution and Bug Reporting

Once the unit testing is done by the developers the test team gets the test build, the test cases are executed and defects are reported in bug tracking tool, after the test execution completion.

Test execution reports are created and circulated to the project stakeholders.

After developers fix the bugs raised by the testers, they do re-testing and regression testing to ensure that the bugs are fixed and not affected by any other areas of the software.

After tester assures that the defects have been fixed and no more critical defects remains in the software the build is given for final testing.

In this phase the final testing is done for the software, non functional testing like stress, load and performance testing are performed in this phase.

The software is also tested in production kind of environment.

Final test cases documents are prepared in this phase.

Test Cycle Closure

In this case the test environment is cleaned and restored to default state, the process review meeting's are done and lessons are documented.

The document is prepared to cope with same problem in future releases.