Different Kinds of Software Testing

Serena Gray
3 min readMay 24, 2021

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There are several forms of testing that you can use to ensure that changes to your code are all working as expected. Not all testing is similar, though, and we will see here how the most important testing methods differ from one another.

Manual vs. automated testing

Let us identify the distinction between automatic and manual tests. Manual software testing is quite costly as it takes someone to prepare an environment and execute the tests themselves, and it may be prone to human error as the tester might make typos or omit measures in the test script.

Automated tests, on the other hand, are done by means of a tool that executes a test script that has been written in advance. These tests can vary a great deal in sophistication, from assessing one method in a class to making sure that performing a succession of complex actions in the UI contributes to exactly the same results. It is much more robust and reliable than automated tests — but the level of your automated tests is dependent upon how well your test scripts are written.

The different types of software testing

Unit testing

Unit tests are extremely low level, near the origin of your program. They consist of analysing individual approaches and functions of their courses, modules, or components used by your software. Unit tests are generally very cheap to automate and can be conducted very quickly by a continuous integration server.

Integration testing

Integration tests affirm that different services or modules utilized by your program work nicely together. For instance, it may be testing the discussion with the database or making certain microservices work together as expected. These types of evaluations are more expensive to run as they need numerous areas of the application to be up and running.

Functional testing

Functional tests focus on the business requirements of a program. They only confirm the output signal of action and don’t check the intermediate states of this machine when performing this action.

End-to-end tests

End-to-end tests are very useful, but they’re costly to perform and can be tough to maintain when they’re automated. It is recommended to have a few key end-to-end tests and rely on lower-level kinds of testing to be able to quickly identify breaking changes.

Acceptance testing

Acceptance software testing are formal evaluations executed to verify if a system meets its company requirements. They require the whole program to be up and functioning and focus on replicating user behaviours. However, they can also go further and measure the performance of the system and reject changes if specific goals aren’t met.

Performance tests

Performance tests check the behaviours of the system as it is under significant load. These tests are non-functional and may have various forms to understand the reliability, stability, and access to the platform. For instance, it may be observing response times when executing a high number of requests, or seeing how the system acts with a significant of information.

Smoke tests

Smoke tests are fundamental tests that assess the basic functionality of the application. They are meant to be quick to execute, and their goal is to give you the confidence that the significant features of the body are working as anticipated.

Smoke tests can be useful right after a new build is designed to decide whether you can conduct more costly tests, or right after a setup to make sure that the program is running correctly in the recently deployed environment.

About the author: I am a technical content writer and I write articles on various IT-related topics. In this article, I have tried to share my views on Kinds of software testing. Follow me for more such articles.

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Serena Gray
Serena Gray

Written by Serena Gray

I work as a Senior Testing Specialist at TestingXperts. I am a testing professional accustomed to working in a complex, project-based environment.

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