May 26, 2016
5 Advanced Software Testing Techniques to Help You Get Through Your Day More Efficiently
Software testing is a vital process in the software development life cycle, but it tends to become a hectic process on when performed a daily basis.
To help you out, I’m going to share with you five advanced software testing techniques that will help you make your day more efficient and productive. Together, we’ll cover systematic and some non-systematic software testing techniques.
Want to know how exactly these testing techniques work? Then keep reading to find out.
1. Identification of Test Scenarios
The basis of your entire testing process is dependent on your test scenarios. QA team should sit together and come up with possible test scenarios. This would maximize the chances of covering majority test cases.
To make sure that your test cases cover the maximum functionality of the system, use the following tips:
- Go through the specifications document meticulously and derive test cases
- If there are conditions applied, create a test case that makes every condition once true and once false
- If there are several branches of any process, make sure that test case cover every branch at least once
- Make sure you know the ‘Expected Result’ for each case
- Same action can not have two outputs
- Identify scenarios for cross-functional testing
2. Use Case-based Testing
You can also get through your day more efficiently by using use case-based testing. In this technique, test cases are developed using the use cases of the system.
A use case encompass the various actors and their interactions with the system. Use cases cover the complete transactions from start to finish. These test cases depict the actual use of software by the end user. These test cases are significant for the acceptance of software by the users.
Your software testing process will be expedited if you already have use cases documented for your project. To apply use case based technique, follow these steps:
- Develop at least one test case for a normal use
- Cover all use cases
- Cover all users
- Identify any dependency between different use cases and cover those
- Develop a test cases for scenarios that have not been identified in the use case. Because that is the place where you are more likely to find loopholes.
You may like to see the following tutorials to get started with creating test cases in ReQtest:
3. Decision Table Testing/Cause Effect Graph
A decision table is also referred as a Cause-Effect table. This technique is used for the functions which respond to a combination of inputs or events. For example, a Submit button on form will only be enabled if the user has entered all required fields.
In order to use decision table testing and to make your software testing effective, the first task is to identify such functionalities where output depends on a combination of inputs. If there is large input set of combinations, divide it in smaller subsets so that the decision table remains manageable.
For each function, create a table and list down all possible combinations of inputs and respective outputs. This might also help in identifying any condition that is overlooked by the requirements analyst.
Follow below steps to create a decision table:
- Enlist the inputs in rows
- Enter the rules in the column
- Fill the column with different combination of input
- In the last row, note down the output against the input combination.
Consider a contact form in which submit button will be enabled on the basis of following rules.
| Rule 1 | Rule 2 | Rule 3 | Rule 4 | Rule 5 | Rule 6 | Rule 7 | Rule 8 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Input | ||||||||
| Name | F | T | F | T | F | T | F | T |
| F | F | T | T | F | F | T | T | |
| Message | F | F | F | F | T | T | T | T |
| Output | ||||||||
| Submit | F | F | F | F | F | F | F | T |
You may like to read more about decision tables.
4. Automated Testing
Automated Testing is becoming popular to make the testing process efficiently. It unloads the testing effort from human testers and assures that no test case has been missed.
You can utilize this software testing technique by keeping the following points in mind:
- Automate the routine tasks
- Automate validations for mandatory fields
- Automate date field validations, if there are any
- Automate input type and input length validations
- Automate the process of checking dead links
- Automate your decision tables
5. Experience-based Testing
Nothing beats the human mind armed with the experience. Make your day more efficient by combining experience with the talent. If you have worked on any other similar project before, use the experience gained by that project into use.
Experience-based software testing technique can be used when the experienced resources share their knowledge with the new and relatively inexperienced testers.
Experienced testers can help the team in the following ways:
- A fresh tester may execute a test case once. But an experienced tester knows that he may create memory issues by repeating the same action several times.
- A fresh tester may execute a test case and passes a functionality. But an experienced tester knows that if he enters a particular input that could break the functionality.
- From experience, you know that it happens that same functionality is implemented in an un-identical manner throughout the application. So, it would be required to check the same functionality at every place.
- Experience based testing enables one to make error guesses. You can look at an error and anticipate the possible faults in the system. The next steps would be to define the test cases designed specifically to expose those errors.
Recap
In today’s article, we have discussed few advanced software testing techniques to help you get through your day more efficiently.
First, we need to identify the test scenarios intelligently to systematically test every feature of the application. Then, we can take help from use cases to depict the behavior of application when used by different actors of the system.
Decision Table Based Testing would be useful to test the scenarios where output is dependent on a set of inputs or events. You can expedite the testing process by automating the test cases using the ReqTest tool. Do not forget to blend in your experience with the testing process.
Start applying these advanced software testing techniques and let us know about your experience in the comment section below.
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