Software Testing Techniques
Testing is one of the most important steps in software development. We need to make sure that our code is doing the task it needs to do without breaking the page. We also need to make sure that the page looks the way designers imagined. In this article, I will talk about Unit Testing and QA Testing techniques.
Unit testing
Just like the name suggests, unit testing is a software testing technique in which individual components or units are tested. You’ll perform unit testing during the development phase.
You’ll test each component that you build for your website so that every single aspect of how that particular component should function is checked. The unit that you write the test for can be an individual function, a method, a module, or an object.
Unit testing is important for many reasons, especially because it helps fix bugs early on in the development cycle. A good unit test will inform you if there is anything you should fix in your code.
Every programming language has a unit test library you can use. If you want to write unit tests in Python, you can use PyTest. For example, here’s how you’d write a test with the Pytest library:
For Java, you can use JUnit, which is a free testing tool. For .net languages, you can use NUnit. And the list goes on.
QA Testing
You should always test new components in a QA environment before promoting the code to production.
For example, when you check a component on the front end, you have to make sure that it looks good in all different browsers and devices. How it looks on Internet Explorer and Firefox will be different from how it looks on an iPhone screen.
Just keep in mind all the different platforms and devices that you should check your application on.
You can do QA testing yourself as a developer, but designers, product managers, or any other member of the team close to the project can perform these tests, too.
Manual testing may be difficult to manage and you might need to have all the devices for which we need to test. For this, there is software that is created that can dynamically run QA tests for us, Rainforest QA is one of those software's that are available.
Rainforest’s mission statement is, “Find bugs before your customers do.” Developers have the ability to create automated tests that can be programmed to respond to pull requests or at a certain time of the day. Rainforest can be programmed to run specific commands and test to see if the expected result is what the developer expects it to be. Rainforest also has the ability to test multiple platforms and devices so we can make sure that any user on any platform or device is seeing what the application iOS is expected to show. Rainforest tests are also relatively easy to set up: product managers or designers can also write tests without any code. In addition to automated tests, developers also have an option to select Rainforest to run manual tests where a QA test engineer on their platform performs the tests we ask them to run.
It’s very important to always test your software before deploying to production.
