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Software quality assurance involves testing software design and implementation to meet minimum quality standards. Testing is the core of the process, covering all aspects of the engineering cycle. Quality management starts in the planning stage, and a test engineer is responsible for executing the testing process. Test plans and scripts automate testing to find defects, including unit, error injection, load, intrusion, and usability testing. Black box and white box testing are two methods of software code testing. Quality assurance also applies to the implementation phase, including alpha and beta testing and regression testing for updates.
Software quality assurance involves testing the design and implementation of computer software and ensuring that it meets a minimum quality standard. At the heart of the quality assurance process is testing, which is the method by which each step of the development cycle is analyzed in order to find defects, such as malfunctions or security problems. The most commonly known part of the software quality assurance process is software and code testing; however, it also covers other aspects of the engineering cycle. Other aspects of software engineering subject to quality analysis include the design and implementation phases.
The general concept of software quality assurance requires that it start at the software planning stage. Poorly planned software can be difficult or impossible to write in a way that meets the expectations of the organization that conceived it. Quality management in the design phase involves studying the ramifications of the project specification or goals, as well as the organization’s plans for achieving its goals. The benefit of design-time quality analysis is that it finds and eliminates errors earlier in the development cycle, rather than later in the development cycle, when design problems are much more expensive to fix.
A software test engineer, also known as a software quality analyst, is the primary person responsible for executing the testing process. This person designs and executes test plans that will help an organization improve the quality of its software. Ideally, a programmer should never test their product, which means that within a project, a programmer and a test engineer are two different people.
Test plans are a key part of the quality assurance system, especially the software testing phase. The purpose of test plans is to determine the conditions that mark the success or failure of the software. A typical test plan will include a comprehensive list of programs and subprograms or procedures that need to be tested, as well as the techniques involved in the test. Another critical function of a test plan is to determine which defects are unacceptable. Test plans are typically designed before the actual software code for the project is developed.
When test engineers write programs to implement test plans, these are called test scripts. Test scripts are an essential part of the software quality assurance process. Their purpose is to automate the testing of a program’s existing code to find defects. Additionally, test engineers typically use commercially designed test tools to look for potential problems. Test plans are implemented during the coding phase of software development.
There are a number of important steps involved in the actual testing phase of the software quality assurance process. These include unit tests, which evaluate the integrity of various sections of software code, as well as error injections, which are designed to investigate how programs respond to bad data. Additional steps include load testing or stress testing, which tests a program’s performance under heavy use, and intrusion or security testing to test a program’s resistance to unauthorized access. A software project is also typically subjected to usability testing, in order to verify that the resulting program is easy for others to use.
Software code testing specialists are usually divided into two groups, one called the black box tester and the other known as the white box or glass box tester. Black box testing is a more superficial process that begins at the coding stage of the software and does not examine any underlying computer code. Investigate the usability of a software, its aesthetic consistency and the occurrence of errors and malfunctions.
White box testing is a process that begins early in the software quality assurance process, in the design phase. It includes predicting potential problems before the code is actually written, as well as writing test plans and advanced test scripts. Unlike black box testing, white box testing also involves studying the underlying computer code.
Quality assurance also applies to the software implementation phase, which is when the software is nearing completion and being installed on computer systems for evaluation. This stage is often referred to as alpha testing and occurs when the nearly finished product is installed and tested by the developer’s staff. When the software is presented to potential customers outside the company, it is called beta testing. If defects occur after the software is released and a patch needs to be developed, regression testing is used to ensure that updates do not create new errors.
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