Seven Principles of Software testing

Software Testing focuses on ensuring the quality of the software. Software not tested properly can cause many problems including financial losses, reputation loss and at times injury or even death. How much testing is required depends on the risks associated with the software as well as time constraints. There are few principles of testing that can help to better understand the process of testing and define testing process

The principles of testing are as follows:

1.  Testing shows presence of defect  

Testing helps in uncovering defects although we can never be sure that that there are no defects in the software even after testing. So the focus of testing is to find as many defects in the system.

2.  Exhaustive Testing is not feasible

 Going by the first principle, tester can never be sure that there are no defects in the system, One of the reason for first principle is exhaustive testing is impossible. We can test all the scenarios related to software but the time and resource cost for testing exhaustively will be so huge, it will not bring any value and will not be able to deliver software. Due to this proper risk analysis and priorities of scenarios should be taken care of in testing for balanced and timely testing completion.  Test cases should be prepared based on the functional specification, as test cases for high priority scenario should be executed first.

3.  Testing should start as early as possible

 Catching defects early in the Software development life cycle reduces the cost of fixing of defect. For e.g. Testing should start as early as possible, Reviews should take place to identify gaps in requirements understanding, and identify code issues early.  Also test designing should start as soon as possible.

4.  Most of the Defects are confined to small module

This has been noticed that most of the defects are confined to small module; the reason of defects can be understanding gaps in the particular set of modules and the technical skill of the resources.

5.  Pesticide Paradox

 Executing the same test cases again and again eventually results in no defects being identified by test cases. Due to this reason test cases should be reviewed from time to time, with new test cases added and redundant test cases removed from the regression pack to keep the test suite fresh, up to date and effective. Test cases must include both manual and automated test cases for higher coverage of test scenarios.

6.  Testing requirement varies from software to software 

Testing is done differently for different software. A social networking site will have different requirement of content and performance testing compared to banking software that will require functionality and security as main factors compared to the social networking site. The testing requirements should be well defined in the scope of testing.

7.  The software developed should be usable by user

and should meet user’s need and expectation. It does not matter if there were no defects in testing the software if it does not meet the need of end users.Software 

Understanding Quality Assurance and Quality Control

Whenever a product is delivered to the client, client expects the quality of the end product to be high. To assure high quality of end products, there must be stress on quality. Quality has different meaning for different users. For developer of a product, it means quality of product meets the requirements mentioned in the specifications whereas for end user, it means the product is fit for use and works as expected. A quality Software should possess desired features,should be fit for use and usable at the desired cost

To ensure quality, there are quality Assurance and quality control groups in the organization. In this article, we will discuss the role and difference between quality assurance and quality control.

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a planned and systematic set of activities necessary to provide adequate confidence that products and services will conform to specified requirements and meet user needs. The purpose of quality Assurance is to ensure quality policies are defined. The project Quality Assurance must ensure process are implemented for:

•      System development methodologies
•      Estimation processes
•      System maintenance processes
•      Requirements definition processes
•      Testing processes and standards

Quality assurance is a continuous improvement activity in processes uncovering weakness in the process and strengthening the process followed. Normally the quality assurance activities are defined at organization level and are uniformly followed across the project. There are regular audits by an independent QA audit team within organization which audits across different project to ensure Quality assurance activities are followed across the organization.

Quality Control

Quality control is the process in which developed product is compared with requirement at different phases and discrepancy is logged as defects. The process of quality control begins with the development phase. This includes Static testing, and dynamic testing.

Static testing includes reviews and analysis of the code using tools. Reviews include manual examination of the code as well as documentation. Reviews are important to identify gaps early in the development process. Defects detected during reviews early in the life cycle are often much cheaper to remove than those detected while running tests Reviews can vary from informal reviews to formal reviews. Informal reviews, Walkthrough, Technical review, and inspection are all examples of review with varying degree of documentation and formal approach. Static analysis also includes verifying the code effectiveness through code analysis tools.

Once the development of the requirement is completed, the product is passed on to testing team for complete testing. The purpose of testing is to uncover as many defects in the system as possible. The focus of testing is look at the product from different views. A system tester or functional tester will verify the system/functionality is working as per functional requirement. Performance tester will need to verify the performance of system under stress and load conditions and so on. How much testing and what testing is required is normally defined in the scope of testing. There are various test management tools like Quality center that helps to manage and map various test artifacts and defects with test cases.

Quality Assurance and Quality Control activities are required to ensure quality deliverables to client and should be followed religiously to ensure high quality to the customer

Understanding Insight Objects in UFT 11.5

With Unified Functional Testing, there were a lot of features like integrating GUI testing and API testing, introducing File Content Checkpoint, and create insight object or recording in Insight mode. 

In this article I will try to explain what this feature of Insight recording is and how to implement same.

Insight is an image-based identification ability, to recognize objects in application based on what they look like instead of using properties that are part of design. UFT stores an image of the object with insight test objects and uses this image as main description property to identify object in the application.

Together with insight property, UFT can use ordinal identifier to uniquely identify the object. Another property we can use is Similarity - Specifies how similar a control in the application has to be to the test object image for it to be considered a match. And Visual relation identifier can also be used to identify the object based on its relative position with respect to other objects in the application. 

Low points of insight object are we cannot add insight object from object spy and snapshots occupy a lot of disk space.

Adding Insight Objects :

UFT allow adding Insight object either in recording Mode or manually in object repository:

1.  Insight Recording

 When we record in UFT, There is option to select recording mode. The recording mode in UFT is default, analog, Low Level recording, and Insight recording. When we select recording mode as Insight recording, UFT records object as insight object for images and identifies rest of objects like edit box as window object WinObject and perform action on them.

Recording bar in UFT 11.5

2.   Insight Objects can be added through Object Repository.

Go to Resources>Object Repository. This will open Object Repository window. In Object Repository window, Navigate to Object>Add Insight objects to Local. This can also be added by icon as shown below.

Once we click on Add Insight objects to local, UFT asks to select Learn Mode which can be manual and automatic. Manual Mode provides magnifier to select minute objects in the application.

Adding object from object repository

Insight object is always added to the object repository as a child of the test object that represents its containing application, such as a Window or Browser object.

In the Editor, test object image is displayed in the step instead of the test object name. Enlarge Image is displayed on hovering over the object.

Options available to work with Insight in UFT 11.5:

UFT 11.5 provides following options for working with insight objects. Options for Insight Object are at Tools>Options>GUI Testing>Insight. This pane enables you to define options that customize how UFT handles Insight test objects when creating test object, and during record and run sessions.

Options to customize the insight object are as follows:

a.   Save the clicked coordinates as the test object’s Click Point when recording a test object.

b.   When recording a test, display mouse operations.

options for insight 

c.   When editing shows test object image in steps and displaying Select learn mode dialog box

d.  Snapshots for insight object takes a lot of disk space, we can provide option to limit test object image, maximum pixels around image, and maximum number of snapshots to save when recording a test object

 

option for insight