product testing

Aug 19 2009   11:00AM GMT

Software developer or bug developer

Posted by: Jaideep
Software developer, software development, unit testing, tester, Bug, product testing, software testing

If a person who develops software is software developer, why not the same person developing bugs in the software be called bugs developer. How many developers ethically perform the unit testing after completing development of a unit? It could be - None, a few of them, some of them, most of them or all of them. Some of them might be under the impression that they perform unit testing after completing a unit but the way they do it might not be really helpful in finding bugs. It might be just to satisfy them what they do and call it as unit testing.

If developers really perform unit testing, find out the bugs and fix them, in actual, then when testing is being performed by the testers why they have to perform unit testing again? Why can’t the testers skip it and save lot of money and time of the organization.

Aug 5 2009   10:00AM GMT

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Posted by: Jaideep
UAT, user acceptance test, testing lifecycle, software testing, product testing, software product, software development, customer specification, interfacing, functional testing, functional requirement, functional specification, business rule, business process, integration test, software build, validation testing, defect fixing, bug fixing, software defect, software bug, appearance testing

UAT or user acceptance testing comes as the last exercise in software testing lifecycle. It is probably the first phase or beginning of customer preparing to takeover the charge of the product. Actually this is a sort of test drive by a perspective buyer who has studied well about a car, has made up his mind to buy it but wants to satisfy himself by actually sitting in the car and driving it. Even if you have made up your mind to buy a particular model and after sitting in the car or after having the test drive, something does not suit you, the decision can take 180 degrees turn.

The same usually does not happen in UAT because the unlike car the software has been built as per customer specifications. UAT usually includes interfacing (if any), look and feel, ease of usage, functional requirements, integration test etc.

Like a car test drive, here also use runs the complete software to assess if the software is meeting their requirements completely or not. It is the last place where the user gets to determine whether or not the software meets his or her requirements. But one thing is very clear – whatever defects occur during UAT, their fixing cost goes manifold as compared to the same defects occurring during the initial building of software.

Main difference between the earlier testing done at development place by testers is that here the business process and validations built in the software will be checked by a business process owner with real data.

Probably in this busy world, if the end user, by any chance is available during the development and testing phase to do appearance, functional, process and validations testing, it would save a big amount of time and money.