TYPES OF TESTING

TEACHER: Good Morning, Let's start with the types of testing. There are mainly 2 types of testing. Can u name them?


STUDENT: Manual and Automation testing. Am I right?


TEACHER: Absolutely wrong. The 2 types of testing are:


1) Static Testing.


2) Dynamic Testing.




The 2 ways of testing are Manual and Automation testing. Never confuse with these terms.


STUDENT: What is static testing?


TEACHER: Testing of any given document. Static Testing is usually conducted using


1) Inspection.


2) Walk throughs.


3) Peer-reviews.


STUDENT: What is Inspection, Walkthroughs, Peer-reviews?


TEACHER: Inspection: It is an formal meeting in which there would be an Author, Reader, judge. All the persons involved has to be informed before 2 days of the meeting.


Author: Author is the person who is involved in the creation of the documents.


Reader: Reader is the person who reads the document and is not involved in any conflicts.


Judge: He is the moderator. He is the person who gives the final verdict.


All this has to be documented as it can be used in future.


Peer-reviews:It's an informal meeting. Here testers play a major role. They can go ahead and cross verify the requirements. They can provide the suggestions.


STUDENT: What is Dynamic Testing?


TEACHER: Testing the behaviour of the application by giving a lot of inputs. We give a lot of inputs. Watch the output. Match with the expected output.


STUDENT: Please tell me the types of Dynamic Testing.


TEACHER: We have 3 types of Dynamic testing.


1) Specification based testing.


2) Structural based testing.


3) Experience based testing.


STUDENT: Please explain me about Specification based testing.


TEACHER: We have 2 types under Specification based testing.


1) Functional testing.


2) Non-Functional testing.


1) Functional Testing: Testing of the application without bothering what makes it work. This includes testing the functionality of the application.


For example, let us take a website. Here functional testing means testing whether all the links are working or not. Testing of external, internal, broken and mail links. Check whether the fields marked in (*) are mandatory. Check whether the buttons are working properly or not.


Functional testing also includes database testing. This means testing for data integrity, data validity, testing of procedures, triggers etc.


1) Non-Functional Testing: Testing of the application for performance, usability, reliability.
If we take the example of a website. We test for performance. This means we check the response time, Load, volume and stress.
a) Performance testing: This type of testing is done on web-based applications. Let me explain the few terms that comes under performance testing.


Response time: Time taken for the server to respond to a request.


Load : Maximum number of users who can access the application at any given time.


Volume: Testing to check how much data the application can handle.


Stress: Testing the performance of the application by decrementing the resources. If the application demands the RAM size to be 124kb, test the application with 64kb RAM and check whether the application crashes or not.


The performance testing is the most important testing done on web-based application. We always use tools to test performance of an application. Some of the tools are Load Runner, Rational Robot.


b) Configuration testing: Testing to check how efficiently the application works across different platforms, different browsers, different processors, different hardware configurations. Under this we have browser compatibility testing.


Browser Compatibility testing: Testing to check how efficiently the application works across different web browsers. Some of the common web-browsers are mozilla firefox 3.5, IE 7.0 and 8.0 etc.


C) Usablity Testing: Testing to check how user friendly is the application. This includes User satisfaction, font size, color of the validation messages and fields.


D) Recoverability testing: This includes testing to check how well an application recovers from a hardware failure or system crash.


E) Security testing: Testing to check how the secure is the application. This includes encryption, authentication and authorization.


Encryption: This includes conversion of data into a form called cyphertext which cannot be easily understood by normal people.


Authorization: Checking for levels of control.


Authentication: Checking for valid user name and password.


Security testing is the most important testing in web-based application. A good hacker is the best security tester in the world.