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System Testing and Quality Assurance

Software development is not a precise science, and humans being as error prone as they are, software development must be accompanied by quality assurance activities. It is typical for developers to spend around 40% of the total project time on testing. For lifecritical software (e.g. flight control, reactor monitoring), testing can cost 3 to 5 times as much as all other activities combined. The destructive nature of testing requires that the developer discard preconceived notions of the correctness of his/her developed software. This means that testing must be done from an entirely different perspective from that of a developer.

In software development project, errors can be come in at any stage during development. The main causes of errors are

1. not obtaining the right requirements,
2. not getting the requirements right, and
3. not translating the requirements in a clear and understandable manner so that programmers implement them properly.

There are techniques available for detecting and eliminating errors that originate in various stages. However, no technique is perfect.

Contents

Fundamentals of Software Testing

White Box Testing

Black Box Testing
Equivalence Partitioning
Boundary Value Analysis

Strategic Approach towards Software testing

Unit Testing

Integration Testing
Top-Down Integration
Bottom-Up Integration

Validation Testing
Alpha and Beta testing

System testing - Recovery Testing, Stress Testing, Security Testing

Role of Quality in Software Development

Software Quality Factors

Software Quality Assurance

Activities Involved in Software Quality Assurance
Application of Technical methods
FTR (Formal Technical Review)
Software Testing
Control of change
Measurement
Record keeping and reporting

Software Maintenance

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