Software Testing

Introduction Testing is often left to the end of the

project which is generally not a good idea. Testing should be conducted throughout

the project. A testing plan should be created at the

beginning of the project and continuously updated during the duration of the project.

At different stages of testing all parts of the system will not be complete, hence stubs my need to be written for these parts.

Stages of Testing

Unit testing Integration testing System testing Acceptance testing

Unit Testing There are approaches to unit testing,

namely, black-box testing and white-box testing.

In black-box testing the tester examines whether each class meets its requirements, i.e. the class is treated as a “black-box”.

White-box testing on the other hand, looks at the code in the class to identify errors.

The default approach is black-box testing, unless the complexity of the program is high in which case white-box testing is used.

Integration Testing The main of this phase is to test the user interface. The tester moves through each menu in a top-down

manner. The use cases are also tested against the menu to

ensure that the requirements are met. This phase also involves interaction testing which

adds on a class and tests it. If the class meets the requirements the next class is

added and so on until the entire system is developed. This testing is then taken from the class to the

package level. If the system exchanges data with other systems this

is also tested during this phase. Test data is used in conducting these tests.

System Testing

Requirements testing Usability testing Security testing Performance testing Documentation testing

Acceptance Testing

The testing is done in two phases, namely, alpha testing and beta testing.

Alpha testing involves use of the system by the users to ensure that they accept the system.

Beta testing uses real data and not test data to identify system errors.