What types of testing should you perform?

There are many kinds of testing that one hears about. You would likely know about many types of testing e.g. white box testing and black box testing, unit testing, integration testing, system testing, system integration testing and so on. The types of testing that would be performed on the application are usually identified in the test planning phase. If you wish to know which kinds of testing are suitable in your project, consider the following questions:

1. Do you have intimate knowledge of the design, logic and code of your application?

If you do, you may want to opt for white box testing. Otherwise (or additionally), you can perform black box testing. You can base your black box testing on the requirements and your knowledge of how your application should function.

2. What types of testing are common in projects?

Most applications are written not as single lengthy source code but rather as a collection of units (e.g. routines, functions or modules). In unit testing, these units are tested in isolation. In integration testing, the interactions between the units are tested.

Further, every application has some functionality. You test the functional requirements in functional testing.

Usability testing is used to determine if the application is easy to learn and use. However, usability testing is more commonly performed on applications with a large user base.

3. Does one test run/ test cycle on your application take substantial time?

If so, you may want to perform sanity testing/ smoke testing to determine if the application is stable and functioning well enough to deserve lengthy or detailed tests.

4. Will your application be used by more than one user? Will it hold or display confidential data?

If so, you should perform security testing not only on your application but also on the application infrastructure (e.g. application servers, database and network).

5. Does your application need to satisfy specific non-functional requirements?

You can group the non-functional requirements. Each group may require a special kind of testing. For example, if yours is a web application that is supposed to run on multiple browser versions, you need to do browser compatibility testing. If your application needs to respond within specific times, you need to do performance testing.

6. Will the user need to install the application before using it?

If so, you should perform installation testing (install and uninstall of the application on each supported platform).

7. Is it a new application or an upgrade?

If it is an upgrade, testing the new features of the application is not enough. You need to ensure that the previously working features are still working correctly. You need to do regression testing.

8. Does your application communicate with other applications/ systems?

System testing (testing the application as a whole) is applicable to every application. In case your application interacts with other applications or systems, you should also perform system integration testing.

9. Do you have an independent team (excluding developers and testers) who can test the application?

If so, they can perform alpha testing on (major) releases before completion.