Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

With the increasing requirements of customers for the quality of software products, the importance of software testing is gradually increasing. However, the phenomenon of attaching importance to development and neglecting testing still exists, and some misunderstandings of software testing will further affect the effective development of software testing activities and hinder the improvement of testing quality and ability. This paper will start with several misunderstandings of software testing, analyze and sort out some phenomena in the process of software testing, in order to help testers better locate and carry out testing work.

1) Software testing is only a stage in the development process.

In the traditional waterfall software development model, software testing is only a stage after the "coding and implementation" stage in the development process, and it is a means to ensure software quality before the software product is delivered to the user.

However, with the increasing requirements of customers for software quality and the continuous development of the software testing industry, software testing plays a more and more important role in the development process. People gradually realize that software testing is not just the end of a software project, but should run through the whole software development life cycle.

The software testing process should be parallel to the software development process, and the specific testing process should include test planning phase, test design phase, test execution phase, test end phase, and test monitoring throughout the whole process. In each stage of the software development life cycle, testing activities with different purposes and contents are needed to ensure the correctness of the software work products in each stage. At the same time, the object of software testing is not only code, but also requirements specifications, design specifications and other work products, that is, software testing not only includes dynamic testing, but also needs to review such static tests.

2) testers are responsible for software quality.

Many people think that testers are responsible for the quality of released software products. If software products are submitted to customers and find problems, it is the testers' responsibility. This misunderstanding not only dampens the enthusiasm of the testers, but also puts pressure on the testers in terms of product quality.

First of all, exhaustive testing is impossible, so testing can only prove that there are defects in the software, but there is no guarantee that there are no defects in it. Therefore, it is normal to find defects in the user site, and what we need to do is to analyze why such defects are left out, whether it is caused by incomplete test coverage or errors in the original requirements definition and functional design, to avoid missing the same errors in future projects.

Secondly, software testing can find defects, and developers can improve the quality of software products after modifying defects. But it is not enough to rely on software testing to improve product quality. The improvement of product quality requires the participation of all members involved in the project, that is, quality assurance activities should run through the whole software development life cycle, including development activities, testing activities, project management and so on. At the same time, collecting and analyzing the experiences and lessons of each development stage can help to implement process improvement and continuously improve product quality.

3) there is no technical content in software testing.

There is no technical content in software testing, which seems to be the subconscious view of many people. They believe that testers do not need to have any skills, that testing is only according to the requirements specifications or users to operate the test object, and compare the found results with the expected results, is an untechnical work. As a result, it is often found that people who are not suitable for development work will move to work on the grounds that development skills are high, while testing does not require any skills: anyone can do tests. This is another very damaging argument for testers.

First of all, software testing has become an independent technical discipline, and qualified testers need to master a variety of different knowledge and skills. for example: in-depth understanding of the background knowledge of software products, understanding of different activities and outputs in the development process and testing process, mastering different software testing techniques and methods, in order to find as many defects in the test objects as possible.

Secondly, testing activities run through the whole software development life cycle. Testers not only need to participate in the review of requirements specifications, design specifications and other documents, but also find problems and defects. At the same time, important testing activities such as test planning and test process monitoring also need to be carried out in the testing process, which also requires testers to master all kinds of related technology. for example: how to effectively estimate the test workload, how to effectively deal with the test risk, how to evaluate the test progress and test quality and so on.

Third, the continuous improvement of the importance of test tools and test automation, and the continuous updating of new tools, new development models, new testing methods and technologies require testers to constantly learn and master these knowledge and skills. testers are also required to have some programming experience. As far as test management is concerned, the requirements of test theory knowledge, project management knowledge and practical experience will be higher.

4) if you have more time, do more tests, and do less.

The test progress is determined by the project development progress, that is, more tests will be done if there is more free time from the project delivery; otherwise, less tests will be done. This concept is largely due to the misconception that testing is a stage in the software development process.

This misunderstanding often leads to a shortage of testing time, because it is highly unlikely that the developer will be able to deliver the test objects. Due to the delay of development, in order to deliver software products to customers on time, the testing time has been compressed again and again, which makes testers tired and have to work overtime, or can only compress the test scope and reduce test coverage. The result is that in order to deliver software products on time, it has to be at the expense of product quality.

Software testing needs to run through the whole software development life cycle, and there should be a relatively parallel relationship between testing and development. While making a software project plan, you need to start developing a software test plan at the same time. An important part of the test plan is to determine the progress of the test (in short, the arrangement of test time, test resources, etc.). Therefore, the workload of testing should be determined early in the project according to the characteristics of the project and the results of risk analysis, not just subject to the progress of project development.

5) Software testing has no future.

Compared with foreign mature software enterprises, the domestic development maturity is relatively lower, or the software development process is not standardized. Sometimes the success of a project often depends on the ability of individual developers, who are responsible for overall design and detailed program design, think that software development is writing code, and often give people the impression that programmers are real experts and are worshipped by people. and have a high status and treatment. Therefore, in this environment, software testing is not taken seriously, the status and treatment of software testers is naturally on the low side, and even software testing becomes dispensable.

With the continuous improvement of customers' requirements for software quality, software testing will become more and more important, and the status and treatment of corresponding software testers will be gradually improved. In large companies where the software development process is relatively standardized, the number and treatment of software testers are not much different from those of programmers, and the treatment of excellent testers is even higher than that of programmers. Software testing will become an industry with great development prospects, and software testing has a bright future. The software market needs more testers with rich testing technology and management experience, who are also software experts.

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