Standardized software testing procedures

There are many standardized exams and numerous test providers. To help guide you toward the exams that are accepted at South Central College please visit the pages highlighted below. Your Credit for Prior Learning Coordinator is a valuable resource in determining if testing will work for you.

Standardized Exams General Procedure Credit for prior learning can be earned through standardized exams administered by nationally recognized testing organizations. Advanced Placement Exam AP Advanced Placement is a program of the College Entrance Examination Board through which secondary students complete college-level courses in high schools that are designated as AP and earn college credits by demonstrating a specified level of performance on AP examinations.

The AP examinations, which are scored on a 5-point scale, can be taken by any student who feels prepared by independent study or other preparation as well as by students who complete AP courses. College Level Examination Program CLEP Credits may be awarded through the successful completion of CLEP in the general examinations in composition and literature, history and social sciences, and science and mathematics, provided no previous academic credits have been earned in these areas.

SCC will award credit for the completion of CLEP with a score of 50 or higher with the exception of Level 2 foreign language examinations for which a minimum score of 63 for German language, 62 for French language, and 66 for Spanish language is required.

Credit may be awarded in subject areas such as social sciences, math, applied technology, business, physical sciences, and humanities. The goal of testing software is not to find bugs or to make software better.

This goal is especially relevant to testing enterprise software with complex digital workflows. In such a case, ensuring smooth functioning, usability, compatibility, and data consistency of the software is of paramount importance due to the higher impact of any issues uncovered after a release. Customers can be impacted by the frequency of an error or undesired functionality, or by the severity of the problem. The reason I define software testing in this way is because—as any tester will tell you— you can never find all the bugs or defects in a piece of software and you can never test every possible input into the software.

For any non-trivial application. So, the idea is not to find every single possible thing that is or can go wrong, or even to verify the software against a spec—as some people like to define software testing—because both are impossible.

Oh, also if you ever find a complete spec for any application in your experience as a software developer, let me know. Instead, the focus and main idea behind software testing is to reduce the risk that the customer is greatly impacted in a negative manner when using the software. Typically this is achieved by first prioritizing what areas of the software are likely to have the biggest impact i. When the actual functionality deviates from the desired functionality, a defect is usually logged and those defects are prioritized based on severity.

Some defects get fixed, other defects are low enough impact that they are just noted and left in the system. Just like the development world has many concepts and methodologies for creating software, there are many ways to think about how to test and the field is changing all the time.

Early in my career, it could be perceived as a slight or insult to call someone who worked in testing a tester; they preferred to be called QA or quality assurance professionals. Just a year or two ago, I attended a testing conference and I made the mistake of calling someone a QA person.

They corrected me and said that tester was the preferred term. When you do black-box testing, you are only concerned with inputs and outputs. Most testing is done in this fashion because it is largely unbiased. Real white-box testing is when you understand some of the internals of the system and perhaps have access to the actual source code , which you use to inform your testing and what you target.

With white-box testing , you have at least some idea of what is going on inside the software. Oftentimes, unit testing is called white-box testing, but I disagree. Unit testing is not testing at all. Advantages Disadvantages Discovering of hidden bugs more efficiently Tester needs to have coding knowledge Code will be optimized Code access required Fast problem and bug spotting Focus on existing software, missing functionality may not be discovered.

The basic idea of acceptance testing is that you have some tests which test the actual requirements or expectations of the customer, and other tests that run against the system as a whole. This kind of testing could be testing the functionality of the system or it could be testing the usability or both.

Automated testing is any testing in which the execution of the test and the verification of the results is automated. So, you might automate the testing of a web application by running scripts which open up a web page, input some data, push some buttons and then check for some results on a page. You could also automate the testing of an API by writing scripts which call out to the API with various data and then check the results that are returned. More and more of testing is moving towards automated testing because manually running through test cases over and over again can be tedious, error-prone and costly—especially in an Agile environment where the same set of tests may need to be run every two weeks or so to verify nothing has broken.

This brings us to regression testing, which is basically testing done to verify that the system still works the way it did before. This is extremely important with Agile development methodologies where software is developed incrementally and there is a constant potential that adding new features could break existing ones.

Part 11 of this standard deals with the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction in a specified context of use. This standard proposed a framework that describes the usability components and the relationship between them. In this standard, the usability is considered in terms of user performance and satisfaction. According to ISO , usability depends on context of use and the level of usability will change as the context changes.

This standard helps in organizing and enhancing the process related to software quality requirements and their evaluations. This standard deals with software packages delivered to the client. A methodology for establishing quality requirements, identifying, implementing, analyzing, and validating the process, and product of software quality metrics.

Arnab Chakraborty.