WHAT IS SOFTWARE TESTING?
Software testing is a process of verifying and validating that a software application or program.
1. Meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development, and
2. Works as expected.
Software testing also identifies important defects, flaws, or errors in the application code that must be fixed. The modifier “important” in the previous sentence is, well, important because defects must be categorized by severity(more on this later).
During test planning we decide what an important defect is by reviewing the requirements and design documents with an eye towards answering the question “Important to whom?” Generally speaking, an important defect is one that from the customer’s perspective affects the usability or functionality of the application. Using colors for a traffic lighting scheme in a desktop dashboard may be a no-brainer during requirements definition and easily implemented during development but in fact may not be entirely workable if during testing we discover that the primary business sponsor is color blind. Suddenly, it becomes an important defect. (About 8% of men and .4% of women have some form of color blindness.)
The quality assurance aspect of software development—documenting the degree to which the developers followed corporate standard processes or best practices—is not addressed in this paper because assuring quality is not a responsibility of the testing team.
