Cards›Knowledge

Software testing

Investigation conducted to provide information about the quality of a software product or service under test and enable the business to understand the risks of software implementation

Software testing is the act of checking whether software meets its intended objectives and satisfies expectations. Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the quality of software and the risk of its failure to a user or sponsor or any other stakeholder. Software testing can determine the correctness of software for specific scenarios but cannot determine correctness for all scenarios. It cannot find all bugs. Based on the criteria for measuring correctness from an oracle, software testing employs principles and mechanisms that might recognize a problem. Examples of oracles include specifications, contracts, comparable products, past versions of the same product, inferences about intended or expected purpose, user or customer expectations, relevant standards, and applicable laws. Software testing can be functional or non-functional in nature. Software testing is often dynamic in nature: running the software to verify actual output matches expected. It can also be static in nature: reviewing code and its associated documentation. Software testing is often used to answer the question: Does the software do what it is supposed to do and what it needs to do? Information learned from software testing may be used to improve the process by which software is developed. A commonly suggested approach to automated testing is the "test pyramid," wherein most of the tests are unit tests, followed by a smaller set of integration tests and finally a few end-to-end (e2e) tests.