Testing Process in Software Testing - Methodologies - Testing Process Steps

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What is testing process in software testing?

Testing process guides the software testing of your product or service, with the help of methodologies. Testing process helps you find out efficiently if your software meets the requirements, works as expected and fails safely. Testing process and methodologies include Test Planning, Test Design, Test Execution, Test Automation, Defect Management. Software testing is also guided by Requirements Management, Release Management, and Communication Management.

Testing process steps and methodologies examples

• Requirements Management: A business analyst gathers and documents the functional and non-functional requirements of the software system from the stakeholders. He then reviews and prioritizes the requirements and communicates them to the development and testing teams. He uses tools like Jira, Trello or Confluence to manage and track the requirements.
• Test Planning: A test manager creates a test plan document that defines the scope, objectives, strategy, resources, schedule, and risks of the software testing in the project. She identifies the test environment, tools and deliverables for the software testing. She shares the test plan to get reviews of the stakeholders, finalizes the test plan and gets their approval.
• Test Design: A test engineer analyzes the requirements and designs tests that cover all the practical scenarios of the software system. He also writes automated testing scripts that automate the execution of the test cases using tools like Selenium, Appium, or Postman. He also collects or designs test data that is required for testing.
• Test Execution: A test engineer executes the test cases and automated test scripts on the test environment and tools. He compares the actual results with the expected results and records the result of each test case. He also reports any defects or issues that he finds during testing to the development team using a defect management system.
• Test Automation: A test engineer uses tools like Selenium WebDriver, Postman or JMeter to automate the testing of web applications, APIs or performance respectively. He writes test scripts using programming languages like Java, Python, or JavaScript and runs them using frameworks like TestNG, PyTest or Mocha. He also integrates the test scripts with continuous integration tools like Jenkins, Git or Docker to run them automatically.
• Defect Management: A test engineer reports any defects or issues that he finds during testing to the development team using a defect tracking system like Bugzilla, Mantis or Zephyr. He also assigns a priority, severity and status to each defect and tracks its resolution. He retests the defects in the test environment after they are fixed.
• Communication Management: A project manager communicates with all the stakeholders involved in the software development lifecycle, such as clients, developers, testers, and end-users. She also updates them on the progress, risks and issues of the project. She uses tools like Slack, Zoom or Microsoft Teams to communicate. The test engineer communicates with the development team regarding the defects.

Tips for Testing Process and Methodologies

• Select or design your testing process and methodologies before starting development. This will help you to align your testing goals with your business objectives and avoid rework later.
• Choose your testing tools wisely based on your project needs, budget, and skills
• Follow best practices and standards for writing test cases, automated test scripts and test data. This helps you have consistency, readability and reuse of your test artifacts.
• Perform testing at test levels, from unit testing to system testing. This will help you to detect defects earlier.
• To test compatibility and scalability, do test execution in different test environments, such as local, remote, and cloud-based
• To get feedback quickly and incorporate changes easily, do test execution iteratively and incrementally throughout the software development lifecycle
• Perform testing collaboratively with your development team using Agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban. This will help you to improve test process quality.

FAQ (interview questions and answers)

1. What do you think are the main components of a test plan document?
   Test scope, test objectives, test strategy, test resources, test schedule, test risks, test deliverables and test environment.
2. What are the types of test design techniques that you use?
   Equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables and state transition testing
   
3. What are the phases of test execution?
   Test preparation: setting up the test environment, tools and data
   Test execution: running the test cases and test scripts on the software system
   Result analysis: comparison of the actual results with the expected results and recording the outcome of each test case execution
   Defect reporting: reporting any defects or issues that are found during test execution to the development team using the defect management process
   
4. What are the factors that you should consider before reporting a defect?
   Reproducibility of the defect, severity and priority of the defect, impact and frequency of the defect, expected and actual results of the defect and evidence and details of the defect.

Remember to just comment if you have any doubts or queries.