What is Software Testing?

Q. Define Software Testing

Q. What is your definition of Software Testing?


» One-liner Answer:

Software Testing is the process used to help identify the correctness, completeness, secure-ness and conformed quality of computer software under development.

» Detailed Answer:

Software testing is the process used to assess the quality of computer software. Software testing is an empirical technical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the context in which it is intended to operate. This includes, but is not limited to, the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs.

Software Testing can never completely establish the correctness of arbitrary computer software. It furnishes a criticism or comparison that compares the state and behaviour of the product against a specification.

» Very Detailed Answer:

Software testing may be viewed as an important part of the Software Quality Assurance (SQA) process. The software faults occur through the following process. A programmer makes an error (mistake), which results in a defect (fault, bug) in the software source code. If this defect is executed, in certain situations the system will produce wrong results, causing a failure. Not all defects will necessarily result in failures. For example, defects in dead code will never result in failures. A defect can turn into a failure when the environment is changed. Examples of these changes in environment include the software being run on a new hardware platform, alterations in source data or interacting with other software.

A problem with software testing is that testing all combinations of inputs and preconditions is not feasible when testing anything other than a simple product. This means that the number of defects in a software product can be very large and defects that occur infrequently are difficult to find in testing.