Topic: Testers and the Testing Process

Testers and the Testing Process

To plan and execute tests, software testers

must consider the software and the function it computes,the inputs and how they can be combined, and the environment in which the software will eventually operate. This difficult, time-consuming process requires technical sophistication and proper planning. Testers must not only have good development skills—testing often requires a great deal of coding—but also be knowledgeable in formal languages, graph theory, and algorithms.

Indeed, creative testers have brought many related computing disciplines to bear on testing problems, often with impressive results. Even simple software presents testers with obstacles, as the sidebar “A Sample Software Testing Problem” shows. To get a clearer view of some of software testing’s inherent difficulties, we can approach testing in four phases:

• Modeling the software’s environment


• Selecting test scenarios


• Running and evaluating test scenarios


• Measuring testing progress

These phases offer testers a structure in which to group related problems that they must solve before moving on to the next phase.

Edited by Mithi25 - 01Aug2009 at 4:32am