Functional Testing, also referred to as System Testing of software is the practice of testing the completed software to confirm that it meets the requirements defined for the software. A functional test is typically a test of user interactions, but can also involve communication with external systems. We contrast functional testing with unit testing. We also show how functional testing provides different benefits than unit testing.
Category Archives: Foundation series
Posted in Agile, Foundation series, Process Improvement, Software development, Test Automation, Testing
Tagged automated testing, black box testing, blackbox testing, blackbox tests, functional testing, functional tests, graybox testing, graybox tests, keyword table testing, managing data, qtp, software development process, software process, software product success, software quality, system testing, testing automation, unit testing, white box testing, whitebox testing, whitebox tests, winrunner
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Foundation Series: Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the software development and quality process where all team members merge their code and verifies it frequently – at least daily. This verification project includes both an automated build process and automated testing. The main benefits of continuous integration come from risk-reduction and cost-reduction.
Posted in Agile, Foundation series, Process Improvement, Software development, Test Automation, Testing
Tagged agile development, agile process, agile testing, automated testing, build automation, continuous integration, incremental delivery, incremental process, iterative delivery, iterative process, managing data, Test Automation
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Foundation Series: Basic PERT Estimate Tutorial
PERT is a technique for providing definitive estimates of how long it will take to complete tasks. We often estimate, or scope, the amount of time it will take us to complete a task or tasks. PERT allows us to provide not only an estimate, but a measure of how good the estimate is. Good estimates are a critical element in any software planning strategy. In this post, we will present an introduction to using PERT, explain how it works and how to interpret PERT estimates.
Posted in Consulting, Foundation series, Process Improvement, Project Management, Software development
Tagged estimating, estimation, Foundation series, managing data, pert, pert analysis, pert analysis estimates, pert duration estimates, pert estimate, pert estimating, pert estimation, planning, project management pert
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Foundation Series: Feature Driven Development (FDD) Explained
Feature driven development (FDD) is one of several agile methodologies for developing software iteratively. Iterative development is the opposite of waterfall development. FDD is a process that begins with high level planning to define the scope of the project, which then moves into incremental delivery. Each increment of delivery involves a design phase and an implementation phase. The scope of each increment is a single feature. Extreme programming (XP) is a much better known agile methodology. XP is often described as an emergent design process, in that no one knows what the finished product is going to be until the product is finished. FDD, by comparison, defines the overall scope of the project at the beginning, but does not define the details.
Software testing series: Pairwise testing
Very large and complex systems can be very difficult and expensive to test. Often, we inherit legacy systems with multiple man-years of development effort already in place, in the field and of unknown quality. With these systems, there are frequently huge gaps in the requirements documentation. Pairwise testing provides a way to test these large, existing systems. And on many projects, we’re called in because there is a quality problem.
Foundation Series: CMMI Levels Explained
CMM is a numeric scale used to “rate” the maturity of a software development process or team. In this context, maturity can be thought of like enlightenment. An immature process is not much different from the old “infinite monkeys” yarn – maybe we get it right, but probably not. A fully matured or enlightened process not only does it right, but improves itself over time. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater, created the CMM model in the late 80′s and early 90′s. In this post, we will understand what each level represents.
Posted in CMMI, Foundation series, Process Improvement, Software development
Tagged capability maturity model, capability maturity model integration, cmm, cmm level.cmmi level 1, CMMI, cmmi framework, cmmi level, cmmi level 2, cmmi level 3, cmmi level 4, cmmi level 5, cmmi overview, intro to cmmi, managing data, sei cmmi
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Foundation Series: User Experience Disciplines
UX, pronounced you-ex, is the shorthand for user-experience. It represents the science and art of tailoring the experience that users have with a product – in our case, software. UX is a relatively new term, rapidly overtaking HCI (human-computer interface) and CHI (computer-human interface) as the acronym du jour. There are several disciplines within this field, we’ll introduce each of them.
Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software
Testing software is more than just manually banging around (also called monkey testing) and trying to break different parts of the software application. Unit testing is testing a subset of the functionality of a piece of software. A unit test is different from a system test in that it provides information only about a particular subset of the software. In our previous Foundation series post on black box and white box testing, we used the inspections that come bundled with an oil change as examples of unit tests.
Posted in Foundation series, Process Improvement, Software development, Test Automation, Testing
Tagged black box testing, continuous integration, Foundation series, grey box testing, greybox testing, managing data, software testing, system testing, system tests, Test Automation, unit testing, unit tests, white box testing
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Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing
Blackbox tests and whitebox tests.
These terms get thrown about quite a bit. In a previous post, we referenced Marc Clifton’s advanced unit testing series. If you were already familiar with the domain, his article could immediately build on that background knowledge and extend it.
Software testing can be most simply described as “for a given set of inputs into a software application, evaluate a set of outputs.” Software testing is a cause-and-effect analysis.
Posted in Foundation series, Polls, Process Improvement, Software development, Test Automation, Testing
Tagged black box, black box test, black box testing, blackbox, clear box test, clear box testing, clearbox, clearbox testing, gray box tests, graybox testing, grey box testing, grey box tests, greybox testing, managing data, software testing, unit test, white box, white box test, white box testing, whitebox
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Foundation Series: Structured Requirements
topsyWidgetPreload({ “url”: “http%3A%2F%2Ftynerblain.com%2Fblog%2F2006%2F01%2F04%2Ffoundation-series-structured-requirements%2F”, “style”: “big”, “title”: “Foundation Series: Structured Requirements” }); Karl Wiegers wrote the book on structured requirements – Software Requirements, 2nd Edition, Karl E. Wiegers. If you are involved in managing requirements, you should own this book. Even if you don’t follow his approach to managing requirements, or don’t like how he deals [...]
Posted in Foundation series, Process Improvement, Requirements, Software development
Tagged business requirement, foundation, functional requirement, goals, karl wiegers, managing data, non-functional requirement, Requirements, requirements management, structure requirements, structured requirements management, use cases
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