Seven Testing Principles

In this tutorial, we will learn about seven testing principles: testing shows the presence of defects, early screening, exhaustive testing is not possible, context-dependent testing, defect clustering, pesticide paradoxes, and absence of error.

Software Testing is a process to execute a program to find an error so that we can produce an error-free program as well as it should perform well. If testing is done successfully, then it will remove all the mistakes from the software.

In software testing, you must achieve the best results while conducting testing without changing the goal. But how a tester can determine that is following the right strategy for testing? For that, you need to follow some basic testing principles.

Some of the universal testing principles used in the software industry are but to understand this, let us consider one example:

To understand this, let us have an example of moving a file from folder X to folder Y.

So, think of all the possible ways you can test and also try to check the following conditions:

  •  I was trying to move the file from one folder to another when it is open.
  •  When Folder Y already has a file with the same name.
  •  When you do not have the security rights to paste the data in Folder Y.
  •  Folder Y is on a shared drive, and storage capacity is full.

If you were to test all possible combinations, project execution time & costs would rise exponentially. To achieve this, we need to follow some testing principles and strategies to optimize the testing effort:

 Defect Clustering – 

In defect clustering, during the testing, most of the defects found are related to a small number of modules within a system, i.e., a small number of modules containing most of the system’s flaws.

There can be multiple reasons for defect clustering like the modules may be involved, coding can be complicated, which are related to the blade.

Testing Shows Defects – 

The purpose of testing is to make the software fail, and screening reduces the presence of flaws or bugs. Testing an application can tell us one or more bugs present in the form, but it cannot prove that the use is error-free. So, it is essential to design test cases that find as many defects as possible. Every application is released into production after a sufficient amount of testing by different teams through different phases like User Acceptance Testing, Beta Testing, System Integration Testing, etc.

 Testing Is Context-Dependent – 

Testing is context-dependent, which means the testing approach depends on the software development context. We need different types of software that need to perform various kinds of testing. For example, screening as a banking application is different from testing any e-commerce application. The risk associated with each application type is different; thus, it is not useful to use the same method, technique, and testing type to test all application types.

 Early Testing – 

Early Testing means to find the software; the first test activity shall be started. The errors that are detected in the early phases of SDLC will be very less expensive. For better performance of software, the software testing will begin with the initial step, i.e., and testing will perform at the requirement analysis phase.

 Absence Of Error Fallacy – 

It built software is 99% bug-free, but it does not follow the user requirement; then, it is unusable. The software doesn’t have to be 99% bug-free, but it is also mandatory to fulfill all the customer requirements.

 Pesticide Paradox –

If the same kinds of tests repeated again and again, then the same set of test cases will no longer be able to find any new bugs and to overcome this issue it is essential to review the test cases regularly, and new and different tests need to be written to exercise different parts of the software.

Exhaustive Testing Is Not Possible – 

It is a process of testing the software’s functionality in all possible inputs and pre-conditions, which is known as thorough testing. Exhaustive testing means the software can never check at every test case, which means it can test only some test cases and assume that it is correct and will produce the correct output in every test case. If the software examines every test case, then it will take more cost, effort, etc., and which is impossible.

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