For any business developing software for a customer loyalty program, at some point in time, there will be an increase in pressure to reach the due date in order to release the product on time. Extra pressure from project stakeholders, such as Marketing and the business website developers will not want to postpone the release date as substantial effort and cost may have already been invested in an anticipated release date.
Quite often, prepared time to go through the process of testing the software (e.g. establish its quality– QA) will end up being lowered so as not to impact the release date. From a pure service point of view, this can be viewed as a positive action as the product is reaching the designated consumers on time. Careful consideration should be taken however regarding the overall effect of a consumer finding a ‘bug’ in the launched item. Perhaps the bug is buried deep within a very odd functional area of the software product, and as the impact just leads to a typo within a seldom-used report, the level of effect is really low. In this case, the effect on business for this software business would most likely be irrelevant. But what if the bug resulted in the program crashing and losing information?
Perhaps this software is utilized within an air traffic control system? As you can think of, the effect of this kind of bug could be extremely high and might result in loss of life and ruining the whole business accountable. So generally, the level of threat of a bug being discovered (possibility) and exactly what is the result of the bug (impact) show to be crucial in how much software application testing is performed prior to an items release.
Due to the intricacy of modern-day software application it is impossible to make sure that software application is bug-free… it really is!
Think of a basic form on a software application that was developed to accept among ten particular values, in order to check this totally, you would have to produce a test case for each and every permutation of the entries that could be gone into by the user, for instance:
- 10( inputs) to the 10( values) to the power
- 10 to the 10th power
- Result = 10,000,000,000 test cases
So, if you were the tester employed to perform the testing, and it just took you one second to carry out each test case, it would take around 317 years to complete. For that reason, the test planning needs to take into account what is actually ‘possible’.
Software testing (associated with the term Quality control) itself can have several purposes (quality assurance, recognition, performance etc). This is a crucial decision when preparing the QA/ software screening, as not testing enough or testing in the wrong locations will undoubtedly result in missed out bugs. The objective needs to be first ascertaining ‘why’ we are going to test and not just ‘what’ we are going to test.
Software testing and or Quality control of your customer engagement programs is still a type of art, generally due to a minimal understanding of the intricacies of modern-day software and site design. Recent years has seen the advancement of software application screening certification such as ISEB and ISTQB. This readies news for the software market as a whole, as the more experienced a software tester is then the level of quality of the software application they are testing can just increase.
Software screening can not ensure software application is bug-free, but it CAN boost software application quality.
