Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of testing, but a major part of their activities also involves regression testing as and
when new parts are added to the software product with the existing functionality.
The introduction of the Internet has brought additional new challenges. Because
the Web sites and portals are accessible by anybody, security threats pose a great
danger. Personal and financial information can be easily stolen. So there is a great
need to make these portals and Web sites secure so that information cannot be
stolen easily. Security testing plays a great role in ensuring that these software appli-
cations are secure.
There are millions of users who throng popular Web sites. Due to this, the
servers hosting these Web sites come under heavy load. These heavy loads can take
the application server down by exceeding memory capacity or computer processor
capacity or crash the computer network due to the huge number of data transfer
requirements. Performance and load testing ensures that these problems are not
faced by the user community or owners of the Web site. Software engineers per-
form performance testing to expose the bottlenecks so that necessary changes can
be made in the hardware and software to prevent such occurrences.
Many software testing tool providers have made life easier for test engineers.
Many tasks that they used to do manually can be automated now with help of
these testing tools. So a significant number of software test projects now involve
automating testing tasks.
1.12
Software Engineering
To reduce defects in software products, measures have been taken over the years.
Software engineering principles have been honed and made better and applied. The
Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University has done a lot of
work, and it introduced the concept of the Capability Maturity Model. Herein pro-
cesses were defined which can be applied to software development projects so that
defects can be prevented from entering the software system being developed. Then
there were some statistical techniques developed which helped to predict and mea-
sure the number of defects in the software system. A pioneering work was done at
Motorola in the 1980s which was later known as Six Sigma. In this process, which
is based on complexity and size, the technology and process utilized in software
development are analyzed and the number of defects is predicted at each stage in
software development (conception, design, and build). Once the number of defects
is known, they are identified using software testing techniques and removed.
Traditionally, once software is built, it is handed over to the software testing
team to test it and find defects. The team uses many techniques including explor-
atory testing, functional testing, regression testing, performance testing, stress test-
ing, and so on, to find as many defects as possible. These defects are then fixed
by the development team and then the testing team retests them. Once they are
fixed, the software is retested again. This cycle continues as per test plan as to how
