Seven Principles of Software Testing or Software Engineering

Seven Principles of Software Testing Or Software Engineering

What makes a great tester? What distinguishes those testers who excel at their craft from the rest of us? To answer these questions, I have put together and formalized my seven principles of software testing.

These Software Testing principles are not the only guiding truths for all testers to follow, but they will serve as a foundation for people looking to improve their testing skills. I find these principles to be universal and timeless – they apply to testers in all domains, for people working on any kind of project and using any testing methodology.

Principles of Software Testing

Each one of these principles can be thought of as a guiding rule that will help you become a better tester. However, it is important to understand that each principle contains within itself many more rules and guidelines, and exceptions.

This is why I like to think of them as principles – every situation is different from the last, and there can be no truly hard and fast rules. The following are the seven principles of software testing:

• Testing shows the presence of defects
• Exhaustive testing is not possible
• Early testing
• Defect clustering
• Pesticide Paradox
• Testing is context-dependent
• The absence of errors fallacy

Testing Shows Presence of Defects

Every software product is delivered to the Client or customer once the software tester performs a right amount of testing land of various types of testing like unit testing, integration testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and beta testing.

A software product is going through by so many testing phases because when the software product passes through with so many stages of software testing, then there will be less chance of having a defect on it.

Sometimes the software is going by so many testing phases and also tested by so many different testing methods, one cannot ensure that the software is 100%. We are testing a software product to reduce the number of defects, but not fore remove all the defects of a software application.

Exhaustive Testing is not Possible

Before starting the second software testing principle, which is regarding exhaustive testing, it is not possible. we have to learn or know:

What is exhaustive testing?

Exhaustive testing is its testing approach in which we testing the software product with all possible data combinations.

Now thing comes to your mind like not possible to do exhaustive testing forest software product?

To understand why exhaustive testing is not possible for a software product, let’s take an example and try to understand. Suppose you are testing a web application, and inside that application, there is a text box is present which can accept integer value from the range 1 to 100. so we can do here the exhaustive testing by manually entering the amount or by using some automation tool.

But if the textbox has the range from 1 to 1 billion, then it’s not possible to test with all the values. You may think that testing by entering manual values is a challenging task, but we can achieve this using some automation testing tools. We can obtain this by using some Automation Testing tools, but it will take a longer time to test with all the possible values, which is 1 to 1 billion.

If you plan to test with all possible values Udit test conditions Office software, then the software testing cost and execution time also increase. so during software testing, most of the software tester is not performing exhaustive testing. instead of thorough testing, the software testers consider some other factors like risk, time, and priorities.

Early Testing

As the name suggests, early testing means all the testing related activities should be started at the initial stages of software testing development life cycles (SDLC), the requirement analysis stage.

Because if we found any defects, then we can quickly fix that defect in the early stage of the SDLC life cycle. This may cost less to correct that defect compared to them if the defects are found in the future phases of the software testing process.

To start the testing process, we required the requirement specification document, or sometimes it is called a software requirement specification (SRS) document. If you have begun our testing in the early stage, which is the verification of the requirement specification document, why filing some software testing methods.

Then we can quickly identify which are defined incorrectly, and we can fix that directly instead of fixing that defect in any other stages of the software development life cycle.

Defect Clustering

Defect clustering means during the testing process of software, and you may have noticed that most of the bugs are coming from a specific module of the application. There may be various reasons for that, such as that particular module was a complicated module. Coding related to such models is complicated, and also there are few other reasons.

As per the Pareto principle, which is also called the 80 – 20 rule, as for this rule, we are getting 80% of defects from the 20% modules, and the remaining 20% of defects are coming from the other 80% of the software.

In this case, you have to concentrate more on our testing on the 20% module, where we are getting more defects or bugs, which is 80% of the total number of bugs.

Pesticide Paradox

This pesticide Paradox principle states that if we are executing the same number of test cases again and again on a specific time duration. Then these test cases are not helpful to find new defects on the software application or the system.

To get over these pesticide paradoxes, we have to review all the existing test cases frequently. If required, then we need to add a new or different test scenario for the implementation of different models of the software application. By doing this, it will be helpful to us in finding new defects in the software application.

Testing is context-dependent

Testing is a context-dependent principle that means you have seen that there are software’s are available for multiple domains, and each domain has many applications on it. And each application has different requirements, functions, techniques DTC.

Let’s take an example, we need to test an eCommerce domain software, and for that, we are following some specific testing techniques to find out the defect on it. But when we are starting and Healthcare domain software, we need to change our software testing technique to a different process.

This shows that each domain software is tested differently because the software testing is purely based on the context of the domain or the application.

The absence of errors fallacy

If you have completed your software testing process by following so many testing methods and testing techniques, you are not any defect before releasing the software. Then you can consider that the software is 99% error-free.

But if the software is tested with some wrong requirements, then finding defects and fixing them on time would not help as we have done our testing with some wrong requirements. Finally, the software is not addressing business needs.

Suppose let’s take an example of a real-time scenario, which is a login scenario. You have found a number of defects in the login module by considering the wrong requirements. As you have tested with the wrong requirements and getting many defects would not help you to move the application to the very next phase or into the production environment.

Final Words

These are the seven essential principles of software testing. CEO at the time of testing software. As a tester, you need to test whether the developed software meets all the user or client requirements. And whether the box which you are found during testing is a mandate or not. These many factors need to be considered before delivering the software or releasing it to the market.

In this post, we have discussed seven principles of software testing or software engineering. Which is comes under manual testing? If you are new to manual testing, we can suggest you go through all the manual testing tutorials.

After learning this manual testing tutorial, you can ultimately proceed with learning like the Selenium tutorial, Core Java tutorial. Also, you can visit our use number of software company’s real-time software testing interview questions.

After reading, if you feel we missed mentioning something, then you can inform us by writing in the comment box, or if you want to contribute an article, then you can contribute by e-mail us at softwaretestingo.com@gmail.com.