Software Testing Questions & Answers (Compiled from UPSC, SSC ,PSC ,IBPS previous question papers)

Product testing means when any company does testing for their own (company’s) product. Example: Norton Antivirus is the Symantec’s product; if Symantec test the Norton i.e. called as the Product testing.

Where as if any company take some projects from some other companies like ABC Company takes projects from IBM and test that project on some charges i.e. called as Application Testing.

Verification: process of evaluating work-products of a development phase to determine whether they fulfill the specified requirements for that phase.

Validation: process of evaluating software during or at the end of the development process to determine whether it specified requirements.

When we have to add new functionality our project, we perform the following steps:

- Quickly add a developer test: we need to create a test that ensures that new added functionality will not crash our project.

- Run your tests. Execute that test, to ensure that new add functionality does not crash our application.

- Update your production code. In this we update our code with few more functionality so that the code passes the new test. Like adding of error message in field where field can take only numeric data.

- Run your test suite again. If test fails, we have to do change in the code and perform retesting of the application.

A test case is a set of conditions which is used by tester to perform the testing of application to make sure that application is working as per the requirement of the user.

- A Test Case contains information like test steps, verification steps, prerequisites, outputs, test environment, etc

- The process of developing test cases can also enable us to determine the issues related to the requirement and designing process of the application.

Matching Defects helps us to remove the locking of same defect in the bug in the application. While using QC, every time we lock a bug, QC saves the list of keywords from the Summary and Description Fields of the bug. When we search for similar defects in QC, keywords in these fields are matched with other defects which are locked previously. Keywords are more than two characters and they are not case sensitive. We have two methods to conduct search of similar defects.

- Finding Similar Defects: compare a selected defect with all other existing defects in project.
- Finding similar Text: compare a specific test string against all other existing defects in project.

Bug Life Cycle:

- When a tester finds a bug .The bug is assigned NEW or OPEN with status,

- The bug is assigned to development project manager who will analyze the bug .He will check whether it is a valid defect. If not valid bus is rejected, now status is REJECTED.

- If not, next the defect is checked whether it is in scope. When bug is not part of the current release .Such defects are POSTPONED

- Now, Tester checks whether similar defect was raised earlier. If yes defect is assigned a status DUPLICATE

- When bug is assigned to developer. During this stage bug is assigned a status IN-PROGRESS

- Once bug is fixed. Defect is assigned a status FIXED

- Next the tester will re-test the code. In case the test case passes the defect is CLOSED

- If test case fails again the bug is RE-OPENED and assigned to the developer. That’s all to Bug Life Cycle.

Build Management is managing the issue fixture tasks in the builds whereas Release management is managing the functionality to be incorporated in the Release.

Build Verification Test (BVT) is done when the build is first received by the testers. The basic functionality is checked with valid data. This is done to check whether the build is testable or not. This is done by testers.

End to End testing is also called system testing. Done by senior test engineers or Test lead.

- The Stub is called from the software component to be tested. It is used in top down approach.
- The driver calls a component to be tested. It is used in bottom up approach.
- Both test stub and test driver are dummy software components.

We need test stub and test driver because of following reason:

- Suppose we want to test the interface between modules A and B and we have developed only module A. So we cannot test module A but if a dummy module is prepare, using that we can test module A.

- Now module B cannot send or receive data from module A directly so, in these cases we have to transfer data from one module to another module by some external features. This external feature used is called Driver.

Quality Assurance: It is nothing but building an adequate confidence in the customer that the developed software is acceding to requirements. Entire SDLC comes under QA. It is process oriented.

System Testing: It is the process of executing entire system i.e. checking the software as well as parts of system.

The difference between baseline and benchmark testing are:

- Baseline testing is the process of running a set of tests to capture performance information whereas Benchmarking is the process of comparing application performance with respect to industry standard that is given by some other organization.

- Baseline testing use the information collected to made the change in the application to improve performance and capabilities of the application whereas benchmark information where our application stands with respect to others.

- Baseline compares present performance of application with its own previous performance where as benchmark compares our application performance with other companies application’s performance.

Test case is a description what data to be tested and what data to be inserted what are the actions to be done to check actual result against expected result what are the actual inputs we will use? What are the expected results? Is called test script. 
Test Script: Is a short program written in a programming language used to test part of the functionality of the software system. A written set of steps that should be performed manually can also be called a test script; however this is more correctly called a test case.

Performance Testing is focused on verifying the system performance requirements like response time, Transactional throughput and number of concurrent users. It is used to accurately measure the End-to-End performance of a system. It identifies the loop holes in Architectural Design which helps to tune the application.

It includes the following:

- Emulating ‘n’ number of users interacting with the system using minimal hardware.
- Measuring End-User’s Response time.
- Repeating the load consistently.
- Monitoring the system components under controlled load.
- Providing robust analysis and reporting engines.

Normally Test engineers are responsible for any release of a project. Even the release is for staging environment or change request release or production release. The minimum documents are:

1. Test Plan

2. Test Cases

3. Test Case Report

4. Bug report.

5. Release notes (which contains known issues).

6. Installation document.

Monkey testing is a type of Black Box Testing used mostly at the Unit Level. In this tester enter the data in any format and check the software is not crashing. In this testing we use Smart monkey and Dumb monkey.

Smart monkeys are used for load and stress testing, they will help in finding the bugs. They are very expensive to develop.

Dumb monkey are important for basic testing. They help in finding those bugs which are having high severity. Dumb monkey are less expensive as compare to Smart monkeys.

Example: In phone number filed Symbols are entered.

Web based systems are those using the internet, intranet and extranets Web based testing only needs be done once for any applications using the web. Web based testing are as follows:

1. Functional correctness

2. Integration

3. Usability

4. Security

5. Performance

6. Verification of code

Localization testing mainly deals with the functionality of application and GUI of the application. The purposes of using Localization testing are following:

- Mainly deal with internationalization and localization aspects of software.
- Evaluate how successfully the language is interpreted into a specific language.
- Translate GUI of application so that it can adapt to a particular region language and interface.