Friday, February 26, 2016

Software, Why it should be Tested?

The question - why software need to be tested -  could be explained in a very simple way with an example: When you are preparing a delicious recipe you would be keep tasting it as the preparation goes on as you add new ingredients into it one after the other to ensure you are making a perfect one. Most probably, your recipe would meet expected standards. If you have not tasted it while preparing, there are many chances that your recipe goes wrong at the end. In the same way, software has to be tested from its beginning of development to the end of development. The time, money and effort you would be using for fixing post product launch issues can be used for effective marketing purpose.

Software Testing is an imperative because a human is prone to make mistakes. Some of those mistakes are unimportant, but some of them are expensive or dangerous. In the ever-growing world of technology, a software product has to function seamlessly and to its potential to serve excellent experience for the users. User experience is one of the important factors for the businesses to consider and put more focus on continuously improving it.

 The results of a buggy software product might be highly cumbersome for the businesses. Apart from user experience factor, the other factors like Functional, Performance and Security are crucial for a software product. The businesses would not be able to identify quality of their software product until unless they have implemented a proper testing. If testing is not deployed, businesses might not have any idea how a tiny yet unidentified bug can cost their business. Minute to minute bugs can bring heavy loss for the businesses in terms of reputation damage, Loss of money, Loss of time, Injury or death (e.g. flight traffic control software), negative publicity about the product/company, reduced product sales. Any software product is developed by a human is always hosts a bunch of defects which need to be identified.  However, this problem can be addressed with appropriate planning and testing. It is best advised that testing has to be deployed at every phase in the SDLC which would help to identify maximum bugs. Or else it might be very difficult to identify these bugs and also might be expensive, and time consuming.

Testing would help to assure the customer satisfaction and reliability of the application. It always should be part of assessing quality of software and ensure that it adheres to its specifications and what management is looking for and demanded by end users. Of course, testing all the code is a tedious and time-consuming task, so having a most efficient test strategy in place would assist in identifying risks, prioritizing tests for test coverage. Testing is crucial which not only helps to improve the quality of the product, but it also lets businesses reap better quality response from the users.

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