26 Aug
Software testing is an important and critical factor in the whole development process. The challenges in modern software testing are constantly growing.
Trends like agile software practices and DevOPs lead to reduced release cycles. This affects not only digital leaders like Amazon (average release time of 11.6 seconds), Netflix (also thousands of updates each day) and Tesla (ships new software update to their cars each 11.5 days on average). More and more organizations in different areas try to keep up the pace. Examples include Walmart, Target, Nordstrom and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Although those trends provide great benefits concerning fast adaptation and efficiency in software development, they work against the nature of software testing.
Manual testing requires a software increment to already be implemented. This implies that testing has to be carried out after software development. Carrying out test cases then requires a significant amount of time. Not only the correctness of added functionality has to be tested. Effects on existing parts of the software have to be tested as well, using regression tests. The time required for this procedure is usually not available in modern software development environments. As a result, testing is reduced to ensure the shipment of software on time. However, this leads to more and more errors slipping through the testing stage into deployed software systems.
Software testers face the following challenges:
- With increasing integration of software into both industry and personal lives, testing becomes a more crucial activity in software development.
- The number of test cases to be considered for ensuring software quality increases due to (i) larger sizes of software and (ii) increasing complexity in software systems
- Reduced release cycles also decrease the available time for software testing, making extensive testing more and more difficult. In following articles, we will discuss current approaches within testing that aim to overcome this Dilemma of the “casual software tester” and make testing future-prone
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Daniel Lehner is a PhD student at the Johannes Keppler University in Linz, Austria. His research focus is on traceability of software information between different stages in the development cycle. During his master studies in Business Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, Daniel worked as a consultant in the area of software quality assurance.
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Daniel Lehner