Testing, QA, and QC are processes to ensure software quality. Testing identifies defects through intentional efforts to make software fail. QA ensures quality standards are followed throughout development. QC verifies software meets predefined standards. Together, testing, QA and QC aim to find and fix defects early to deliver high quality software. The document discusses various testing types like black box/white box testing and provides examples of real world software failures caused by a lack of effective testing.

1. Testing, QA, and QC
Introduction to Testing, QA, and QC
1
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

2. What is Testing?
 Testing is the process of identifying defects, where a defect is any
variance between actual and expected results.
 Testing should intentionally attempt to make things go wrong to
determine if things happen when they shouldn't or things don't happen
when they should. It is oriented to 'detection'.
2
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

3. What is Software Testing?
 Software testing is a process used to identify the correctness,
completeness, and quality of developed computer software. It includes
a set of activities conducted with the intent of finding errors in software
so that it could be corrected before the product is released to the end
users.
 In simple words, software testing is an activity to check whether the
actual results match the expected results and to ensure that the software
system is defect free.
3
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

4. Why Software Testing?
To get adequate trust and confidence on the product.
To meet the Organizational Goals like meeting requirements, satisfied
customers, improved market share, zero defects, etc
Since the software can perform 100000 correct operations per second, it
has the same ability to perform 100000 wrong operations per second, if
not tested properly.
Testing is important because software bugs could be expensive or even
dangerous (See examples in the next slides.).
4
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

5. What is Quality Assurance (QA)?
Quality means consistently meeting user requirements in terms of cost,
delivery, schedule and service.
Quality Assurance involves the entire software development process.
Process is monitoring and improving the process, making sure that any
agreed-upon standards and procedures are followed, and ensuring that
problems are found and dealt with.
QA ensures that all parties concerned with the project adhere to the
process and procedures, standards and templates, and test readiness
reviews.
QA focus early in life cycle.
It is oriented to ‘prevention’.
5
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

6. What is Quality Control (QC)?
QC is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors
involved in production. This process places an emphases on 3 aspects
Elements such as job management, defined and well managed
processes, performance and integrity criteria etc.
Competence such as knowledge, skills, experience, and qualifications
etc.
Soft elements such as confidence, organization culture, motivation,
team spirit, and quality relationships etc.
QC ensures that the products or services that are provided to meet
specific requirements and characteristics, such as being dependable,
satisfactory, and safe.
6
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

7. QA versus QC
QA
QC
A planned and systematic set of activities
necessary to provide adequate confidence that
requirements are properly established and
products or services conform to specified
requirements.
The process by which product quality is
compared with applicable standards; and
the action taken when nonconformance is
detected.
An activity that establishes and evaluates the
processes to produce the products.
An activity which verifies if the product
meets pre-defined standards.
Helps establish process.
Helps implement the process.
Identifies weaknesses in processes and improves
them. Identifies defects for the primary purpose of
correcting defects.
Identifies defects for the primary purpose
of correcting defects.
QA is the responsibility of the entire team.
QC is the responsibility of the tester.
Prevents the introduction of issues or defects.
Detects, reports and corrects defects.
QA improves the process that is applied to multiple
products that will ever be produced by a process.
QC improves the development of a
specific product or service.
QA personnel should not perform quality control
unless doing it to validate quality control is
working.
QC personnel may perform quality
assurance tasks if and when required.
7
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

8. Some Software Failures
In UK in June of 2012 RBS/Natwest banking payment system crashed for
several days. This failure left millions of people unable to perform
transactions like Money has not been flowing into accounts after being
deposited, payrolls have been delayed, credit ratings downgraded, utility bills
not being met.
It’s the worst computer system outage the UK financial system has ever seen.
In Asia in July of 2011 reported that software bugs in a national
computerized testing and grading system resulted in incorrect test results for
tens of thousands of high school students. The national education ministry had
to reissue grade reports to nearly 2 million students nationwide.
A smart phone online banking application was reported in July 2010 to have
a security bug affecting more than 100,000 customers. Users were able to
upgrade to a newer software version that fixed the problem.
8
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

9. Some Software Failures
It was reported in August 2009 that a large suburban school district
introduced a new computer system that was 'plagued with bugs' and
resulted in many students starting the school year without schedules or
with incorrect schedules, and many problems with grades. Upset students
and parents started a social networking site for sharing complaints.
Software system problems at a large health insurance company in
August 2008 were the cause of a privacy breach of personal health
information for several hundred thousand customers, according to news
reports. It was claimed that the problem was due to software that 'was not
comprehensively tested'.
9
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

10. Some Software Failures
Tens of thousands of medical devices were recalled in March of 2007
to correct a software bug. According to news reports, the software
would not reliably indicate when available power to the device was too
low.
Etc.
All these problems and failures due to lack or ineffectiveness of
testing effort.
10
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

11. Successful Software Testing

It depends on how efficiently the Testing Process is integrated into
the Software Development Process.
11
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

12. Why does software have bugs?

Miscommunication or no communication - as to specifics of what an
application should or shouldn't do (the application's requirements).

Software complexity - the complexity of current software
applications can be difficult to comprehend for anyone without
experience in modern-day software development. Multi-tier
distributed systems, applications utilizing multiple local and remote
web services applications, data communications, enormous relational
databases, security complexities, and sheer size of applications have
all contributed to the exponential growth in software/system
complexity.

Programming Errors
12
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

13. Why does software have bugs?

Changing requirements (whether documented or undocumented) - the enduser may not understand the effects of changes, or may understand and
request them anyway - redesign, rescheduling of engineers, effects on other
projects, work already completed that may have to be redone or thrown out,
hardware requirements that may be affected, etc. If there are many minor
changes or any major changes, known and unknown dependencies among
parts of the project are likely to interact and cause problems, and the
complexity of coordinating changes may result in errors. Enthusiasm of
engineering staff may be affected. In some fast-changing business
environments, continuously modified requirements may be a fact of life. In
this case, management must understand the resulting risks, and QA and test
engineers must adapt and plan for continuous extensive testing to keep the
inevitable bugs from running out of control

Time pressures - scheduling of software projects is difficult at best, often
requiring a lot of guesswork. When deadlines loom and the crunch comes,
mistakes will be made.
13
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

14. Why does software have bugs?

Egos - people prefer to say things like:
•
No problem
•
It’s a piece of cake
•
I can whip that out in a few hours
•
It should be easy to update that old code
instead of:
•
That adds a lot of complexity and we could end up making a lot of mistakes
•
We have no idea if we can do that; we'll wing it'
•
I can't estimate how long it will take, until I take a close look at it
•
We can't figure out what that old spaghetti code did in the first
place' If there are too many unrealistic 'no problem's', the result
is bugs.
14
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

15. Why does software have bugs?

Poorly documented code - it's tough to maintain and modify code that is
badly written or poorly documented; the result is bugs. In many
organizations management provides no incentive for programmers to
document their code or write clear, understandable, maintainable code. In
fact, it's usually the opposite: they get points mostly for quickly turning out
code, and there's job security if nobody else can understand it ('if it was
hard to write, it should be hard to read').

Software development tools - visual tools, class libraries, compilers,
scripting tools, etc. often introduce their own bugs or are poorly
documented, resulting in added bugs.
Etc.
15
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

16. Approaches to Software Testing
There are different approaches to software testing.
• White Box and Black Box Testing
• Dynamic and Static testing
• Manual and Automated Testing
• Verification and validation Techniques
White Box Testing: This testing that takes into account the internal mechanism
of a system or component.
Example: Unit Testing
Black Box Testing: This testing that tests the functionality of an application as
opposed to its internal structures or workings.
Example: Functional Testing
Static Testing: In this testing software code will be examined without being
executed
Example: Code Inspections, Reviews, Walk-through etc.
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.
16

17. Reviews and Walkthrough
 Walk-through: It will be conducted informal, usually conducted by the
members of the group which will include the author. It’s main purpose is
understanding. Usually, little or no preparation is required.
Example: Improving Programming Logic, Design approach, Test case steps,
Test scenarios etc.
 Reviews: It is similar to Walk-through, conducted formal by a group of
persons (author need not be one among them) look for errors, mistaken
assumptions, lack of clarity and deviation from standard practice. It’s main
purpose is decision making.
Example: Review of Business Requirements, Test Plans, Process Improve
documents, Project Plans etc. and make go or no go decisions.
 Inspection: A formal individual and group checking using standards as per
defined rules and procedures. It’s main purpose is find defects.
Example: Inspect Organization policies, User manuals & procedures etc.
17
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

18. Approaches to Software Testing
Dynamic Testing: In this testing software code will be executed and tested without
necessarily being examined.
Example: Black Box testing
Manual Testing:
Manual testing is the process of manually testing software for defects. It requires
Testers manually execute test cases without using any automation tools.
Automation Testing:
Automation Testing means using an automation tool to execute your test case
suite. The automation software can also enter test data into the System Under
Test , compare expected and actual results and generate detailed test reports.
18
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.

19. Approaches to Software Testing
Verification: It is a process of determining whether output of one phase of
development conforms to its previous phase.
It is a set of activities carried out to check whether we are ‘building the system
right’.
Verification is concerned with phase containment of errors
Example: Set of white box testing activities.
Validation: It is a process of determining whether a fully developed system
conforms to its Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document.
It is a set activities carried out to check whether we are ‘building the right system’.
Validation is concerned about the final product to be error free.
Example: Set of black box testing activities.
19
Discovering the unexpected is more important than confirming the known.