01 December, 2014

Avoiding Risk of Application Failure with Quality Software Testing

As a key field of software testing, reliability testing is performed widely by businesses to ensure that the application is working under given environmental conditions. Thus, software reliability testing help enterprises in avoiding risk of application failure by identifying and fixing the problems in its design and functioning. However, each business must focus on a number of important features to eliminate the risk of application failure by optimizing the quality of software testing.

Tips to Prevent Software Application Failure through Effective Reliability Testing

Include All Types of Reliability Testing
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Normally, software reliability testing includes a variety of testing including feature testing, regression testing and load testing. As the name indicates, feature testing is conducted to check the application’s feature. But load testing is performed to check how the software performs under maximum work load. At the same time, regression testing aims to identify the new bugs that are created while fixing previous bugs. To eliminate the risk of failure, the software reliability strategy must include these three distinct testing types.

Create and Execute Adequate Test Cases
The primary objective of reliability testing is to decide how long the software can be executed without failure. So the testing strategy must emphasize on creating adequate number of test cases, and execute them for a sufficient amount of time. When the test cases are executed for a longer duration, the QA professionals can identify buffer overflows, memory leakage and similar defects that cause application failure due to longer and consistent execution.

Distribute the Test Cases Properly
Along with writing sufficient number of test cases, it is also important to distribute the cases properly. To identify bugs and defects effectively, the test cases must be distributed according to the software’s planned or actual operational profile. For instance, a higher number of test cases must be allocated to the subset or function of the software that is being executed repeatedly or more often.

Identify Problems in Designing Test Cases
The quality of the test cases will also have an impact on the software’s performance under environmental conditions. So the QA engineers need to ensure that no problem occurs while writing test cases. If the test cases are written to check valid input values for each field in the application, they cannot be reused to test new features when changes are made to the module. Likewise, the QA professional have to select the test cases carefully to ensure that no critical run in the software remain untested.

Write Separate Test Cases to Assess New Features
To make the software more popular, businesses often add new features to its current version. The QA engineers must write additional and separate test cases to evaluate the new features. Along with deciding the number of test cases to be written, the testers also need to share the test cases of both current and new versions. Finally, they have to combine the test cases for both existing and current versions of the application, and execute them to record all test results. The QA engineers will need time to write additional test cases, but their efforts will drastically reduce the chances of application failure.

Evaluate Reliability through Operational Testing
The reliability of a software application in its relevant operational environment also needs to be checked through a method of operational testing. However, the QA engineers must focus on several factors while creating the operational environment. While creating the operational environment to test a mission-critical software application, they must include future reliability as part of the evaluation. Also, the testers must use the right technique to predict the future reliability of the software.

On the whole, each organization must perform software reliability testing to avoid risk of application failure. But the reliability testing strategy of the business must aim to achieve design improvement through failure analysis. At the same time, testing strategy must focus on feature, load and regression testing.

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