Humans have a nature of testing everything which comes across; let it be a small electronic good to big item such as car. The purpose of this testing is to make sure that thing which is being focused works according to the specifications. The ill functioning might lead to loss of money, time or business reputation or even could be a cause of injury or death.

For now we will restrict ourselves to Software Testing. Definition of which can be givens as - Software testing means to ensure that the software designed is working as per the specifications.

Human errors is not the only factor leading to software failures but also environment conditions such as radiation, electronic fields, pollution, magnetism can influence the software execution leading to its failure.

To get a clear picture, we have some of the major and real time examples of software failures –

• A major U.S. retailer was reportedly hit with a large government fine in October of 2003 due to web site errors that enabled customers to view one another’s’ online orders.
• In October of 1999 the $125 million NASA Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft was believed to be lost in space due to a simple data conversion error. It was determined that spacecraft software used certain data in English units that should have been in metric units.
• In April of 1998 a major U.S. data communications network failed for 24 hours, crippling a large part of some U.S. credit card transaction authorization systems as well as other large U.S. bank, retail, and government data systems. The cause was eventually traced to a software bug.
• Software bugs caused the bank accounts of 823 customers of a major U.S. bank to be credited with $924,844,208.32 each in May of 1996, according to newspaper reports. The American Bankers Association claimed it was the largest such error in banking history. A bank spokesman said the programming errors were corrected and all funds were recovered.

So what do we learn from above examples ?

It is important to understand the necessity for Software Testing and importance of it. Though coders develop the most sophisticated and smartest products in the world but does it produce what was intended is the key.

Through testing, the risk of software failures can be reduced. Problems also called as defects or issues in technical term, found in the system during testing can be corrected before the system goes live to the end users. Thus, software testing can give more confidence in the quality of software.

Conclusion

The goal of software testing are

• Find defects.
• Gain confidence in the quality of software.
• Providing information and preventing defects.

Over to you !

So what do you interpret when you hear the word “Software Testing” ? , Does it give you a scary picture where software are drilled down or it makes you think you will find more things which even you did not know about it ? Share your views , questions and ideas in comments.

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About The Author of this article: Deepak and Diptee are one of the co-authors of this blog and writes majorly on software testing and more. You can read more of their articles here.

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