Software Testing In The Software Development Process

The Importance Of Software Testing In The Software Development Process

By Read Dive 5 years ago
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A software development process can be viewed as a set of organized activities used to define, develop, test and maintain software. There are several software development processes, however, there are some basic activities common to most existing software development processes. This article will describe some of these activities, such as

  1. Requirements gathering;
  2. Requirements Analysis;
  3. Project;
  4. Implementation;
  5. Tests;

Requirements gathering:

This activity aims to understand the problem, giving developers and users the same vision of what should be built to solve the problem. Developers and customers together seek to raise and prioritize the needs of future software users (needs referred to as requirements).

Requirements Gathering is the most important step in terms of return on project investments. Many projects are abandoned due to low requirements gathering, meaning team members did not allow enough time for this phase of the project to understand customer needs regarding the system to be developed.

And because an information system is often used to automate business processes in an organization, those processes of the organization must be well understood so that the rest of the development process activities flow according to the customer’s actual needs. The planning for the development of software products is very important. You can refer to the maintenance planning courses to get the idea to develop the software product successfully.

Requirements Analysis:

This step, also called the requirements specification, is where developers make a detailed study of the data collected in the previous activity. From where models are built to represent the software system to be developed.

The interest in this activity is to create a solution strategy, without worrying about how this strategy will be carried out, that is, using customer needs, once the problem has been understood, to solve the requested problem. Thus it is necessary to define what the system should do before defining how the system will do.

What often happens is when development teams go to the software problem without completely defining the problem at hand. In this phase, it is then necessary to validate and verify the built models, before starting to solve the problem.

Validation: aims to ensure that the software system is meeting the customer’s real needs;

Verification: Verifies that the models built in the analysis conform to customer requirements.

Project:

It is at this stage you must consider how the system will work internally so those customer requirements can be met. Some aspects should be considered in this phase of system design, such as system architecture, programming language used, database management system used, graphical interface standard, among others. In the project a computational description is generated, mentioning what the software should do, and it should be consistent with the description made in the requirements analysis phase.

The project has two basic activities: architecture design (or high-level design), and detailed design (or low-level design).

In an object-oriented development process, architectural design is typically performed by a software architect. The architectural design aims to distribute the related object classes of the system into subsystems and their components, also distributing these components across available hardware resources.

In the detailed project, the relationships of each module are modeled in order to realize the module’s functionalities. In addition to developing the user interface project and the database project.

Implementation:

At this stage, the system is coded from the computational description of the design phase in another language, where it becomes possible to compile and generate executable code for software development.

In an object-oriented development process, implementation takes place by defining the object classes of the system in question and making use of programming languages. Pre-existing software tools and class libraries can also be deployed to streamline activity, as well as the use of CASE tools that streamline the development process in various activities, including source code generation, documentation, etc.

Tests:

Several testing activities are performed in order to validate the software product, testing each functionality of each module, seeking, taking into account the specification made in the design phase. Where the main result is the test report, which contains the relevant information about errors found in the system, and their behavior in various aspects. At the end of this activity, the various system modules are integrated, resulting in the software product.

Implantation

Finally, the deployment comprises the installation of the software in the user environment. This includes system manuals, importing data into the new system, and training users to use the system correctly and properly. In some cases when prior software exists, prior data migration of that software is also performed. After implantation, the maintenance of the software product is very important. Learn about maintenance planning training.

The importance of software testing:

Software testing is very important in ensuring system quality control. It must ensure that the system meets all requirements as the customer has requested. However, software testing covers a much larger area than system quality control.

Testing is a tool that companies use to minimize financial costs and prevent corporate reputation from diminishing. When a quality test is performed on the system, it can prevent a problem that would cause a lot of damage in the future.

A defect that is discovered in production may have the cost of correcting it up to 100 times more than a defect discovered in the test stage. A company that produces low-quality software is not well regarded in the market. So software testing plays a major role in the software development process.

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