This question appears in Mumbai University > Software Testing & Quality Assurance Subject

Marks: 10 M

Year: Dec 2012

System testing:

• The objective of system level testing, also called system testing, is to establish whether an implementation conforms to the requirements specified by the customers.
• Identifying system test categories has the following advantages:
  1. Test engineers can accurately focus on different aspects of a system, one at a time, while evaluating its quality.
  2. Test engineers can prioritize their tasks based on test categories.
  3. Planning the system testing phase based on test categorization lets a test engineer obtain a well-balanced test suite.

System testing categories :

1.Basic tests:

• Basic tests provide an evidence that the system can be installed, configured, and brought to an operational state.

• Basic tests are performed to ensure that commonly used functions, not all of which may directly relate to user- level functions, work to our satisfaction.

2.Functionality tests:

• Functionality tests provide comprehensive testing over the full range of the requirements within the capabilities of the system.

3.Robustness tests :

• Robustness tests determine how well the system recovers from various input errors and other failure situations.

• Robustness means how sensitive a system is to erroneous input and changes in its operational environment.

4.Interoperability tests :

• Interoperability tests determine whether the system can interoperate with other third party products.
• An interoperability test typically combines different network elements in one test environment to ensure that they work together.

5.Performance tests :

• Performance tests measure the performance characteristics of the system, for example, throughput and response time, under various conditions.

• Performance tests are designed to determine the performance of the actual system compared to the expected one.

• Resource usage, scalability of the product and reliability are validated under this testing.

• Performance testing does not aim to find defects in the application, it address a little more critical task of testing the benchmark standard set for the application.

6.Scalability tests :

• Scalability tests determine the scaling limits of the system in terms of user scaling, geographic and resource scaling.

• In scalability testing, tests are designed to verify that the system can scale up to its engineering limits.

• The idea is to test the limit of the system, that is , the magnitude of demand that can be placed on the system while continuing to meet latency and throughput requirements.

• Scaling tests are conducted to ensure that the system response time remains the same or increases by a small amount as the number of users are increased.

7.Stress tests :

• Stress tests put a system under stress in order to determine the limitations of a system and, when it fails, to determine the manner in which the failure occurs.

• The goal of stress testing is to evaluate and determine the behaviour of a software component while the offered load is in excess of its designed capacity.

• The system is deliberately stressed by pushing it to and beyond its specified limits.

• It ensures that the system can perform acceptably under worst-case conditions under an expected peak load.

8.Load and stability tests :

• Load and stability tests provide evidence that the system remains stable for a long period of time under full load.

• Load and stability tests are designed to ensure that the system remains stable for a long period of time under load.

9.Reliability tests :

• Reliability tests measure the ability of the system to keep operating for a long time without developing failures.

• The reliability of a system is typically expressed in terms of mean time to failure (MTTF).

10.Regression tests :

• Regression tests determine that the system remains stable as it cycles through the integration of other subsystems and through maintenance tasks.

• The main idea in regression testing is to verify that no defect has been introduced into the unchanged portion of a system due to changes made elsewhere in the system.

11.Documentation tests :

• Documentation tests ensure that the system’s user guides are accurate and usable.

• Documentation testing means verifying the technical accuracy and readability of the user manuals, including the tutorials and the on- line help.

12.Regulatory tests :

• Regulatory tests ensure that the system meets the requirements of government regulatory bodies in the countries where it will be deployed.

• In this category, the final system is shipped to the regulatory bodies in those countries where the product is expected to be marketed.