Optimizing quality and value through the Software Testing Life Cycle
The quality of software products directly affects customer retention and brand reputation. A faulty release can lead to cascading effects on the business. A single software bug in a release could negatively impact your business for years to come. Money and profit are lost through endless cycles of patches and fixes, and business costs increase as users require additional technical support.
Software testing reduces the risk for the company by ensuring the usability and quality of the released software product. This post will look at the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) and how it can reduce risk and increase value in each release. Experienced CIOs and IT managers who understand and leverage the phases of STLC can reduce costs, improve product quality, and accelerate the release schedule.
Also, in the following blog post, we look at each phase of the STLC and identify its goals and results to show how you can use software testing to improve business processes and create value for the entire organization.
What is the Software Testing Life Cycle?
The Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) is a quality assurance methodology that tests a software product or system for usability.
The STLC detects glitches, problems, bugs, or other software defects that may affect usability. Security engineers, developers, test engineers, and requirement analysts should identify potential software vulnerabilities as testing requirements to improve security. The STLC should ensure a smooth and successful rollout for each new release.
The software engineering community developed the STLC methodology to enforce test standardization as development teams have adopted agile methods rather than the conventional waterfall method.
Software testing and the waterfall method
Traditional or classic software delivery methods, including the waterfall technique, use development stages. These stages provide a logical progression of work, strictly linear and sequential, and a phase cannot begin until the previous step is complete.
This stringent process strengthens discipline and supports early software development. The vast teams required for development require discipline and clear guidelines for each phase.
Verification/Testing is a distinct phase in the waterfall method, separate from the other stages, such as concept, design, and implementation. The testing team must complete the work in the testing phase before the project moves to another step to ensure the usability of the software.
Introducing Agile
The software development community developed the Agile Manifesto in response to the changing software industry’s needs. Companies needed more flexibility in development to be able to react quickly to changing market needs.
In the past, smaller, less specialized teams worked on development. Waterfall and a strictly linear development process could have offered companies the flexibility and adaptability needed.
Agile uses an iterative and step-by-step process, enabling short cycles of continuous product improvement. At the end of each cycle, the stakeholder or team responsible for the work evaluates it and defines new goals, intending to have a releasable product at the end of each cycle.
This process gives companies more flexibility. The team can adjust the work quickly and efficiently as it defines goals before each cycle. Shorter release cycles are possible because a usable product should be available at the end of each cycle.
Agile eliminates the heavy testing phase, and testing occurs concurrently with programming and other development tasks.
Software Testing and Agile
Testing standards have been developed to ensure the quality of a software release under an agile process, framework, and ecosystem, which became known as the Software Testing Life Cycle.
Agile typically does not assign specific team members to test software; each team member should perform testing during a work cycle. Clean software builds are loaded daily using automatic compilation and unit test execution. This process is known as Continuous Integration (CI).
Testing is also performed throughout the development process and by team members. The “whole team approach” to testing happens when everyone is responsible for testing. For instance, agile developers test their work and possibly their peers, but they are not necessarily “testers.”
The STLC provides a standardized, sophisticated, and robust testing process that can be used in agile development’s short, iterative cycles. It standardizes the phases of pre-release testing of software products and applications — each phase with different goals and results, and testing and programming happen simultaneously.
In the next post, we look at the SDLC phases and explore how they can improve an organization’s business processes in an ongoing process of value creation.
