Software Testing is considered as a Cost for some Stakeholders & an Investment for others in their context of operation. It’s good to know the status in your context. I had this query in LinkedIn Answers & thought of sharing the good discussion to my blog readers.

Do you consider Software Testing as an Investment or a Cost in your Context ?

Bug Database for the products might have thousands of issues over a period of time against various builds and releases. Though these issues fixed over a period of time, it might be hard to derive meaningful metrics over the release.

We need to support these releases over the production systems & it might be helpful to capture the hot spots / risk elements with the release. Most of the issues here to deal with the respective features, compatibility with other features / technologies & performance related issues.

The usual metrics of number of issues against a module and their severity levels may not be of help always.

How easy is it to derive the following from the Bug Database for a given release

1. Identify the issues have originated from Requirements, Design & Implementation
2. Identify the issues over their category (Functional, Performance, Security, Compatibility, Usability etc)
3. Identify the issues along with their origin & category over the features rather than the modules / components

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In this post, i will explore different stages of the Bug from it’s inception to closer. The Bug has been found and logged into the Bug Tracking System. It’s my fourth post in the Bug Life Cycle series.

1. The Bug has been found and logged into the Bug Tracking System. It will be treated as New Bug in the System.
2. The Bug will be assigned to the concerned Developer for a Resolution.
3. The developer looks in to the possibilities of the resolution & takes a call on Resolution by fixing it or differing over the information provided.
4. Tester validates the resolved issue in the build & checks for the regression scenarios over the fix.
5. If the issue found fixed, then he choose to Close the issue else he / she will Re-open the same.
6. The Cycle follows again for the re-opened issue till it gets closed.

It worth doing the following activities

1. Capturing the required and re-usable info to the Bug Report at it’s each stage.
2. Check for all the closed bugs of Severity 1 & 2 against final build for the release.

In the next post, I will share my thoughts on the useful metrics over the Bug Tracking Repository.

Happy Testing..

The popular myths around Blackbox & Whitebox Testing are by it’s name. It’s black since we can’t see it (don’t have access to the code) & it’s white since you have access to all the code. But then, With in the code there are many black boxes inside and it’s tough to have access to that code base.

• We don’t have access to code of a language API. Most of the applications have been built on top of a API & assume that the API works fine
• Most of the application do integrate some third party tools over it’s API. We don’t have access to that code base.
• We don’t have access to the code of Compiler
• We don’t have access to code of rum time engine that executes our application code
• We don’t have access to the code of Operating System Services on top of which the application runs

The list goes on and there are many black boxes in side our code too. We are just testing the code written for the application and it’s better to call it as Code Based Testing rather than Whitebox Testing

– Happy Testing..