Software Testing: A Luxury or a Necessity?

Software testing industry is mushrooming and many software companies have opened the quality assurance outlets to attract heedful customers. With the highly demanding user and throat cut competition, people have realized that any bug or dysfunctionality in the app/website/software will simply result in losing customers, revenue and reputation. Therefore, the trend of software testing is increasing. However, there are still many people, who are unaware or confused about software testing. Some people believe that this “additional” cost can be avoided and other believe that testing is only for the complex systems and ERPs.

I feel that there is a need to address the concerns and questions about software testing in a simplistic way, so that people can find the answers and understand the need of software testing. I have structured the most commonly asked questions as under:

What is Software Testing?
Why Software Testing is necessary?
When to conduct software testing?
Who conduct software testing? And lastly
Where to conduct software testing?

I will surely not give you the definitions as you can find better definitions from highly qualified IT professors and scientists on Wikipedia and on other IT sites. I want to keep it simple like I said in layman terms. Let’s create a scenario to find answers more easily and clearly. Suppose you own a website that gives reviews on the latest gadgets and smart phones. Now you want to create an IOS/android/windows app for your website so that smart phone users can use it in a more user friendly manner and avail other options. To create an app, you will contact the software development house. After briefing them about your needs and how you want the app to look like, the development house will work on it for few days and provide you with the app you asked for. Now here comes the role of testing (there are two when to test approaches. I will discuss it below). Let’s start with the first basic question.

What is software testing?

Software testing is a surefire way to ensure that the software developed has no bugs, glitches and issues. Software tester tests the website/app/software from different dimensions to ensure that there are no loopholes and bottlenecks in the software. This activity of testing and breaking the application from different angles by creating different test scenarios and cases is called software testing.

Why software testing is necessary?

Some people believe that software testing is not needed if the company has competent and experienced developers, as chance of going wrong or committing an error is very low. This is totally wrong. The objective of software testing is to break the software by testing it from different angles via using various testing tools. Testing is imperative before rolling the app in the market to ensure that your app will perform all the user defined functions sanely, is user friendly and has no load management capabilities.

When to conduct software testing?

There are two approaches when we talk about when we need to conduct software testing. The approach that is being used these days is that development and testing goes side by side. You develop some part of the application, test it and deliver the task (build, project) to the client. The second approach is that you first develop the application and after getting done with the development, you send the app to the testers to test it. However, first approach is most commonly used as it sums up your work and makes the development process simpler and easy.

Who conduct software testing?

Now this is a very interesting question. You must be thinking that as the app is developed by the team of competent software engineers, there is no need to test the app. Moreover, developers can also conduct testing, as they are computer science graduates. Unfortunately, this doesn’t hold true anymore. Days were gone when developers used to conduct testing. It doesn’t matter how competent software engineers are and how experienced is their team lead, there are always some bugs that remain untouched and some issues that need to be fixed. Therefore, it is the duty of software testers to test the app/website/software as it demands different skillset, tools and techniques. It also requires a different approach and mindset.

Where to conduct software testing?

Now this is kind of a promotional question. So I will not talk much about it. As software development companies provide you the services of development and coding, there are independent software testing companies that provide you with the software testing solutions. Most of the time, development companies have in house QA team for the testing purposes, but you need to make sure that they are really carrying out testing as it is not their core product and usually they lack QA knowledge base, experience and basic QA testing tools. On the other side, software testing companies are built on the business model to provide software testing services as their core product to earn revenue.