Software Testing Services
A
key area to focus on when considering a software testing company is its
software testers. Today there exists two popular certifications, ISEB
and ISTQB. Try and ensure that the software testers at least hold these
certifications at foundation level. Another factor with regards to
software testers is the amount of experience they have. Many software
testing companies state that there testers have five years I.T.
experience. But reading between the lines, this simply means that they
have five years experience anywhere in the field of Information
Technology. You should really ask the software testing company, how many
years professional software testing experience they actually have.
Many
software testing companies offer a wide range of software testing
services. Caution should be used though, as many of these companies will
advertise these services but may not necessarily have the expertise to
perform them. The types of software testing services that any
professional company should offer is:
Test Case Creation
This
very popular service typically involves creating detailed test cases
that not only can be used on the project under test, but also due to
their high quality can be re-used on future projects and form a high
quality test documentation asset. Good testers will accumulate all
required information necessary to produce the test cases, typically from
design documentation, requirements and developer interview. Once the
information has been analyzed a software tester will create a
sophisticated excel spreadsheet which includes test cases, results
sheets, environment setup and version details etc. Clients are involved
in every stage of test case development in the form of a test case
review process.
Functional Testing
Typical software
products today include large amounts of critical functionality and
complex features, added to this significant time pressures to get the
product released make functional testing one of the most important stage
of any software development. A software tester's manual functional
testing techniques have been proven to be highly effective at
essentially determining whether or not the functionality actually works,
or not.
Versatile software testers can work from their own created test
cases or use any pre-existing test cases you may already have. Good
software testers readily use ad-hoc techniques when executing any tests
to expand the test coverage. The aim during functional testing is to
highlight any issues as early as possible so the developers can resolve
it. This can obviously effectively reduce the development costs to your
company.
Usability Testing
In order to ensure your
software meets the needs of the end user; Usability Testing can be used.
Not only will usability testing detect errors, but it will also detect
navigational issues, language issues, workflow experience etc. Good
software testers put themselves into the mindset of the end user and
will report on the 'look & feel' of the software under test. Good
software testers often build a set of test cases based upon real end
user scenarios or business cases to ensure the software is tested in a
similar way to how the real end users will actually use the software.
This type of software testing has been proven to increase the ROI of
software developments by enhancing the end user experience and therefore
potentially increasing product sales. As usability testing is trying to
ensure that the end user experience is appreciated, we perform this
type of testing manually.
Regression Testing
Regression
testing is surprisingly often overlooked area of software testing. This
is often due to the assumption that when new functionality is working
correctly then the software is ready for release. However, more often
than not, additional issues have been introduced that affect existing
functionality. Software testers have the knowledge and experience to
identify existing test cases that are suitable for regression.
Regression test cases are commonly functional test cases that are reused
at regular intervals throughout the software development to ensure that
the expected results remain consistent, thus providing confidence that
nothing has been adversely affected by change.
Acceptance Testing
Acceptance
testing is typically driven by the end user or customer. Acceptance
test cases are normally executed by the customer prior to accepting the
product. But commonly, these test cases are also given to the software
developers to ensure their product meets the level of acceptance before
the end of development. Software testers can perform execution of these
test cases to highlight any issues to the development team as early as
possible. Software testers can also derive expected acceptance test
cases from customer requirements for you. On a smaller scale our
software testers can also derive smoke tests to act as a form of
acceptance tests during stages of the software development life cycle.
System Testing
System
testing of software is testing conducted on a complete, integrated
system to evaluate the system's compliance with its specified
requirements. Good software testers treat System testing as an
investigatory testing phase, where the focus is to have almost a
destructive attitude and will aim to test not only the design, but also
the behavior and even the believed expectations of the customer.
Software testers will It is also test up to and beyond the bounds
defined in the software requirements specification. This is test that if
a failure occurs, that it is handled correctly by the software with as
little impact on the customer as possible.
Exploratory Testing
Commonly,
while the software is being tested, a good software tester learns
things that together with experience and creativity generates new good
test cases to run. Good software testers consider exploratory testing to
be an approach that can be applied to any test technique, at any stage
in the development process. Software testers adopt the exploratory
approach during all stages of testing. However, many software test teams
use the exploratory testing approach during the final stages of a
development just to allow a software testers to roam freely throughout
the software focusing on areas of functionality that the software tester
has a 'gut feel' where there may be issues. This approach can often
detect defects that have previously not been considered in other 'more
formal' areas of software testing.
Installation Testing
Installation
testing is a type of software testing that focuses on what customers
will need to do to install and set up the new software successfully. The
testing process may involve full, partial or upgrades install/uninstall
processes. Good software testers will typically perform installation
testing when a compiled version of code has reached the final stages of
testing or pre-production environment, from which it may or may not
progress into final production. By the use of virtual machines, software
testers can replicate many different operating systems and environments
to fully test installation of software.
http://www.testing4success.com
is a professional software testing company providing highly
cost-effective outsource software testing services to companies around
the globe. We can provide outsource software testing services to
supplement your existing project, or provide dedicated outsource
software testing for entire projects, all delivered on-time and with
outstanding results. Please contact us with any questions you may have,
or for a free quote.
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