Software Testing – Its Goals - Its Limitations.

Software Testing or Software Quality Assurance verifies and validates the software application against its initial technical requirements. It is used for determining software quality factors like reliability, usability, security, integrity, capability, efficiency, portability, compatibility etc. The procedures may differ as per the purpose for which the software is being tested. This also needs to be performed well within its specified budget and time limits.  

Software Testing Goals:

In testing, goals can be defined as intended outputs. It has the following goals:

Verify and Validate: Software testing is a quality control measure. It is used to verify that the application or product works as desired. It reports the status of the actual application in comparison to the requirements. Hence, it should reveal as many inconsistencies as possible, verify if the software is meeting its initial requirement specifications and further validate its quality.

Prioritization of Test coverage: As already stated, exhaustive testing is not possible due to many constraints mainly budgetary and time limitations. Therefore, the test coverage areas should be defined properly. Highly frequent functions should be tested more thoroughly than infrequent functions. For optimized results, highly used components should be isolated and tested more thoroughly.

Balance: Testing needs to be balanced between the negotiated requirements, the practical limitations and user expectations. The end users viewpoints cannot be all that matter as all the needs may not be achievable due to limitations in time, budget and technical feasibility.

Deterministic: While testing, it should be clear as to what is being tested and what will be its possible outcome. All the errors and defects should be exposed while performing a particular testing. This clean insight helps in determining the cost, time and the overall development.

Traceability: Comprehensive documents need to be maintained as testing is being performed. This helps to avoid chaos and hence eliminate duplicate testing.

The Limitations:

The limitation of testing needs to be considered to set a realistic expectation of its outcome. The main limitations of testing can be listed as follows:

-          It is done with the intention of finding errors. Exposing failures make this process more effective. Thus it cannot show the absence of errors.

-          It only delays the process. It provides no help to decide on the product's immediate deployment or to delay its release.

-          It cannot ensure the overall compatibility of the system rather it establishes its compatibility only on a specified combination of the system.

-          Software Testing does not enable locating the exact error. Rather it just establishes the existence of one.

-          A total or exhaustive software testing is practically not feasible. This leads to compromise and thus it cannot be ensured that the final delivered product is entirely bug-free.

Conclusion:

Software testing can give excellent results if they are performed efficiently and effectively. It helps to improve an application by identifying its defects and problems. Independent Software testing is aimed at achieving both implicit and explicit goals. To achieve this, everyone who is involved with this process must be aware of its goals, its principles and its limitations.