Software Testing Types | The most common types

What are Software Testing Types?

Software testing types are the different ways and strategies that you conduct to check a software or application fully, each type focuses on a particular test objective with different test strategy. To help you find out which kind of test is best suited for your projects, this article will clarify the most popular testing types along with detailed definition and goal.

1. Functional Testing

Functional testing is a type of software testing that clarify the performance of particular functions of a software application.

The responsibility of functional testing is to make sure that the application and all of its functions work exactly as business requirements and qualify all specifications. It’s a primary testing method to check out that the output provided by each application function is the same as what’s expected.

2. GUI Testing

Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing is a procedure of ensuring that the UI function – visual elements follow its specifications and identify the defects. The elements should be checked may include the design, menu bars, toolbars, colors, fonts, sizes, icons, content, buttons, etc. How do they interact with user actions?

3. Performance Testing

Performance testing is primarily conducted to determine how a system behaves in terms of responsiveness, stability, reliability under individual workloads. With different kind of performance test, you will receive different data. For example, the KPIs report about a number of virtual users, number of hits or errors per second, response time and the correlations between them. From that, you can find out the bottlenecks, bugs, and errors…easily.

4. Load Testing

Load testing is a type of performance testing that evaluate the natural load on any software, application, or website. It observes how the system behaves from normal to high loads and determines if it can handle high loads given a high demand of end users. This tool is typically conducted when the project is nearly for release.

The benefits of load testing is discovering of obstacles before product’s release, control of system downtime, increase user satisfaction, and decrease failure costs.

5. Security Testing

Security Testing is a testing process that makes sure the application and system are free from any possible loopholes and weaknesses which may lead to a big trouble for business like private information loss.

The purpose of Security Test is protecting organization’s information and checking whether the application is under vulnerable attack when the hacker tries to destroy the system or login without authentication.

6. Unit Testing

A unit test is a small single part of a program that can be tested, it can be anything from full functions to a small button of the software, you must make sure all the small units are able to work individually before confirming the whole software are ready to work.

Unit tests may be done by software developers to ensure that code follows the design and specifications and reacts as expected.

The goal of unit testing is separating the application into particular parts to check they are working correctly.

7. Integration Testing

As the name of integration testing, this kind of test is checking the interface and integration between components, interactions to between other parts of the system like operating system, file system, and hardware…

Integration tests seem to be similar to unit tests excluding one thing: while unit tests are segregated from other elements, integration tests are not.

8. Usability Testing

Usability testing is the process of verifying the ease to use of a design within a group of target users. It often involves observing flexibility in handling controls and ability of the system to meet its objectives. It is a repeated process from early development to releasement.

The main role of usability testing is to find out usability issues in a design as soon as possible, so they can be resolved it before the design is applied in production. Moreover, usability testing is usually implemented on prototypes more than on final products.

9. Accessibility Testing

As a subset of usability testing, accessibility testing is a process of ensuring that users of all abilities and all level can use your software or application. Particularly, it’s usually used to test software, hardware, mobile applications, and websites.

In an accessibility testing process, the tester uses the product as a disabled user. The disabilities may include deaf or hard of hearing, intellectual disability, visual impairment or functional limb weakness.

10. Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is an unscripted testing technique which focuses on the QA autonomy and creativity. This is a hands-on approach where testers are involved much in test execution but not much in planning. Exploratory testing is used to discover unknown issues during and after the software development procedure. Moreover, the tester can apply this type of test to find out specific bugs, that is a way to learn about the application and design functional and regression test cases to be executed in the future.