Latest trends in Testing: Micro Focus

By Swikriti Singh, SiliconIndia   |   Tuesday, 04 January 2011, 00:29 IST   |    4 Comments
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Latest trends in Testing: Micro Focus
Bangalore: Changes in the role of Quality, Technology and Methodology have set new trends in terms of Software Testing. In an interactive session with Joachim Herschmann, Product Director, Test Automation and Akshay Agarwal, Country General Manager, Micro Focus, the new trends were discussed and more light was thrown upon the subject matter. What are these new trends in Testing and how effective is the impact created by them? Both Joachim and Akshay opined that it is needless to state that testing stands nowhere when compared with quality which is required in all the phases. The most important and effective trends in testing according to them are: 1.Internet: It has raised the bars and standards of Testing with the in-detail written articles and notes about it as a field along with the already emerging and advancing technologies. The growing popularity of mobile Internet has led to an unprecedented rise in the demand for data intensive applications, high performance mobile terminals and next-generation network equipment. 2.Cloud software: With its success and its upcoming uses, it is the latest trend setter in technology market. Cloud testing is a form of software testing in which web applications that use cloud computing environments seek to simulate real-world user traffic as a means of load testing and stress testing web sites. In regard to test execution, the software offered as a service may be a transaction generator and the cloud provider's infrastructure software. 3.Test Driven Development: It is a software development technique that ensures your source code is thoroughly unit-tested as compared to traditional testing methodologies, where unit testing is recommended but not enforced. It combines test-first development and refactoring. 4.Virtualization Testing: With Testing going complex, the test environment set-up, getting people access to the environment, and loading it with the right bits from development, all take up about 30-50 percent of the total testing time in an organization. Virtualization ensures that test labs reduce their energy footprint, resulting in a positive environmental impact, as well as significant savings. 5.Continuous Integration: It is a trend that is rapidly being adopted in testing, where the team members integrate their work with the rest of the development team on a frequent basis by committing all changes to a central versioning system. Beyond maintaining a common code repository, other characteristics of a CI environment include build automation, auto-deployment of the build into a production-like environment, and ensuring a self-test mechanism such that at the very least, a minimal set of tests are run to confirm that the code behaves as expected. 6.Crowd Testing: It is a new and emerging trend in which, rather than relying on a dedicated team of testers, companies rely on virtual test teams to get complete test coverage and reduce the time to market for their applications. A crowd test vendor identifies a pool of testers that meet the requirements, creates a project, and assigns work. Testers check the application, report bugs, and communicate with the company via an online portal. 7.Tools driven developer testing: Traditionally, developer testing was primarily limited to unit testing and some code coverage metrics. IDE-integrated tools have made the self-testing practice acceptable to developers, and the unit-testing and coverage analysis process automated for them. Development teams are also expected to perform a level of security testing (threat modeling, buffer overflow, sequel injection, etc).