In this week’s blog post, I will discuss the article “The Different Types of Software Testing” by Sten Pittet. This article discusses different kinds of tests, some differences between manual and automatic testing, and how to automate testing. I chose this article because it fits well with the software testing section of the syllabus. I also liked how the author went into great detail about the tests mentioned in the article. In this blog post, I will discuss some of the software testing methods in the article.
The first test discussed in the article is the unit test. “Unit tests are very low level and close to the source of an application. They consist in testing individual methods and functions of the classes, components, or modules used by your software. Unit tests are generally quite cheap to automate and can run very quickly by a continuous integration server.” From what is mentioned in the article, unit tests appear to be immensely helpful in testing smaller pieces of a program. Due to their ease of automation, they could also be beneficial for parts of a program that occur often. The following tests discussed in the article are integration tests.
Integration tests are imperative to ensure different parts of your program function well together. “Integration tests verify that different modules or services used by your application work well together. For example, it can be testing the interaction with the database or making sure that microservices work together as expected. These types of tests are more expensive to run as they require multiple parts of the application to be up and running.” While these tests are very helpful, due to requiring multiple systems to be running simultaneously, this type of test can be very costly to run regularly. The next test that I will discuss is the functional test.
Functional tests are very different from the prior two tests I have discussed, wherein the first two tests check the functionality of sections of your project. In contrast, available tests explicitly check for the project’s output. “Functional tests focus on the business requirements of an application. They only verify the output of an action and do not check the intermediate states of the system when performing that action.” This test is beneficial for the business application of a project. In contrast, the project’s pieces must function for the customer, and the project as a whole must also do what it was designed to do, and functional tests are great for determining this.
Article: https://www.atlassian.com/continuous-delivery/software-testing/types-of-software-testing
From the blog CS@Worcester – P. McManus Worcester State CS Blog by patrickmcmanus1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.