What is software testing? why its necessary?

Folks,

I am starting with basics of testing which gives the answers to following questions.

why software testing is required?
when software testing is required? and
who will be doing this blah blah ?

Folks, 2 years back story, i wanted to buy a 2 wheeler vehicle for me, as I was fed up with BMTC buses in Bangalore to travel from home to office and office to home. I went to bike showroom and asked for the bike, the person who is at the showroom started firing question on me like
"Sir, which model you want to buy?"
"what is you budget?"
"what are the features you needed" and so on....

I was quite a bit, i was thinking what i need to answer for his question, after some time i asked for the brochure for each model which is available. I placed one by one, side by side on the table then started thinking about the features, cost, mileage, pickup and other factors.

Folks, whatever i mentioned above i am looking for the "Quality" factors in the bike which i am going to buy.

Similarly, all software will have a Quality factors which should be known to the user while selling the software, like what i told about bike story (features, cost, mileage, pickup and other factors) .

Then you may get a question: What is meant by quality in terms of software???

It is defined as "the probability of failure-free operation of a computer program in a specified environment for a specified time".

The Quality of software is measured in terms of following factors.

* Reliability of software: - How the software is quality of being dependable.
*Understandability: - How the capability of the software product to enable the user to understand whether the software is suitable, and how it can be used for particular tasks and conditions of use.
*Completeness:- How the component of data quality describing the completeness of coverage within a data set(s).
*Portability:- How the software code base feature is able to reuse the existing code instead of creating new code when moving software from an environment to another.
*Consistency:- How consistent the software in the functionality wise.
*Maintainability:- How capable to meet the new requirement (Hardware or software) in future.
*Testability:- How much depth we can test the features of the software, to know uncover the uncertain things.
*Usability:- How good the software for the usability point of view.
*Security:- How much security features are given by the software where access for the personal data in the web.
and so on...

Folks, now you can understand there are 'n' number of factors depending on the usage of the users makes a Quality software product.

How this quality term is attained to say the quality product is ready to sell or launch for the services? their comes the picture of "Software testing".

Folks, if you see the term software testing is a part of software Engineering, which brings the Quality tag to the software to sell/ get served in the services.

Folks, Nowadays everyone want to use the quality software products, which has features better than anything and everything in the world, There is a lot of competency is going on in the industry to get sell/get served from the customers directly or indirectly.

So, folks the term "Quality" is well defined/identified for a software products which is undergone software testing process in the SDLC (software Development Life Cycle).

Now you may be got the answers for the following:

why software testing is required?
Ans: Software testing defines the Quality for the software based on the defined quality factors.

when software testing is required?
software testing is done after the product development activities are over and released for testing.

who will be doing the software testing?

before answering this question we need to know the role of software QA.

The software Quality is defined by the Quality Assurance (QA) Team. Team is responsible and drive the software Quality term policy across all projects running in the company.

The Software tester will be doing the testing the software product based on the QA assistance/checklist to software quality.


My Next Blogs includes the topics on the followings:
* SDLC
* QA
and many more...

if you have still doubts/queries on this blog, please feel free to blog me. :)