The digital space is awash with competing Software Products and so it’s more important than ever to ensure that our digital products stand out from the crowd.

To achieve this, it’s vital that our digital products are resistant to failure and offer a compelling user experience – get this wrong and interest in a product can quickly diminish. Therefore, it’s important that development teams are continuously looking at ways to expand their testing capabilities.

Software Product Testing is a fundamental phase of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) which is crucial to Software Product teams to ensure their product is reliable, performant and secure.

The Testing phase of the SDLC is where software produced by development teams is thoroughly tested to ensure that it meets original business requirements, is free from defects, free from known security vulnerabilities, runs efficiently and is therefore in a state of readiness to be deployed for end users to utilise.

With development teams churning out new code for their products on a regular basis, it’s essential that testing is performed continuously and largely in an automated fashion.

At a high-level, Software testing can be broken down into two core strategies, Manual Testing and Automated Testing.

Manual Testing is where human testers create test cases or test scenarios that check a Software Product works as defined by the business requirements. These are usually test scenarios that can’t be covered by automated tests. These tests are run one after the other, results are verified, and any issues discovered are passed onto the development team to be rectified.

Automated Testing is where developers build scripts which test all aspects of a product. These tests can consist of Unit Tests, which are small tests written to test individual units of source code. Integration Tests ensure that individual units of source code work as intended when used together. End to End tests test a particular application flow from start to finish, for example testing to ensure that the login on your product works correctly when provided with valid credentials.

The great thing about automated tests is that they can be ran quickly and as frequently as required and provide fast feedback to developers if a test has failed and why it has failed. This becomes extremely beneficial when the running of automated tests is integrated with the deployment process for your Software Product. Whenever developers push new code into a product, these automated tests can be triggered to ensure that the code changes have not negatively impacted any existing functionality.

Benefits of testing for businesses

• Reputation – a product that is riddled with bugs, has performance issues, low uptime or poor user experience can have a lasting impact on a company’s brand. By adopting a solid testing strategy that ensures a high level of quality in your products, you are conveying to your customers how much you value quality. This helps to build trust, establishes long term customer relationships and builds a positive reputation.
• Security – customers trust Software Products to store their data securely. Any kind of breach in data can have disastrous consequences. Security testing can help ensure that our products are hard to exploit.
• Cost effectiveness – bugs found in products post-production can cost a business a significant amount more money to resolve than if found during the testing stage or earlier. Whilst testing won’t detect 100% of bugs, the greater the test coverage, the more chance of detecting a bug before it makes its way into production.
• Product expansion – having good test coverage of your product makes it easier and faster for development teams to build and deploy new features. Test coverage of existing code ensures that new features don’t interfere with existing features and clean code architecture is enforced when writing code that is testable, which makes the code more maintainable and extendable.

Benefits of testing for technical teams

• Code Documentation – having a high level of unit test coverage on your product can act as technical documentation for developers to utilise when trying to understand what your code is trying to achieve.
• Encourages improved code quality – unit testing can help to ensure that code is written with a higher quality. It forces developers to consider the design of their code from the start, which can lead to reduced coupling, more reusable code, code that is easier to understand, maintain in the future and easier to test.
• Confidence that pushing code changes will not break existing functionality – once your product has a high level of test coverage, you can be more assured that changes being made by your team will not break existing functionality without being immediately notified through test reports.
• Ability to detect security vulnerabilities early – automated testing can also be used to see how well your product stands up against known security vulnerabilities. If a vulnerability is discovered, then the team can be immediately notified, and the issue rectified before making its way into production. This is a great way to ensure your product is always safe to use.
• Bugs can be discovered earlier – once your product has a high level of unit test coverage, bugs in the code are more likely to be discovered at an early stage of your test strategy.
• Reusability of test scripts – automated tests can be repeatedly run as many times as needed and on demand. This can present a huge saving in terms of time and cost when compared to manual testing.

As you can see, Testing is an important process which must be considered to ensure that our products are built to a high quality and continue to offer the user experience that our customers have grown to expect.

As a team we are reviewing testing to see what strategies work best for us and see where we can make enhancements to deliver greater test coverage of our products.

By Gregg Rogers

Gregg Rogers is a Sr. Software Engineer at Skewb. To speak with him about this topic in more detail, you can connect with him on Linkedin.