Are You Not Testing Software?

[Jesper]

A lot of our discussions are about software testing. Anyone else not testing software?

Currently I’m testing infrastructure – that is servers and configurations. A colleague is testing IT networks. And I know there is a tester around that tests trains and tunnels. ..

[Ronan Healy]

I think this is a valid question. Apart from management are there others areas where testers might not be testing all the time?

[Magnus]

At my previous job i did black box testing of hardware. It was quite different from software testing.

[Tassawer]

I know a friend of mine who is doing medical equipment testing.

[kokila]

Good question. I wants to know more detail. i have done testing only for software and applications. Thanks for this question.  

[MOD link removed /JO]

[stefan]

<span class=”ms-translatable”>A lot of our discussions are about software testing. Anyone else not testing software?</span>

Context can be really diferent when interpretting this question.

Can be about doing various other roles: test-management, project management, release management,business analysis, system analysis, checks automation.

Can be about doing additional activities which aren’t about software testing a product: workshops, presentations, blog posts, trainings, trying tools, poc of various technologies,

Can be about testing something else other than software: a process, a requirements document, a workshop’s meeting minutes, a test-strategy or plan from another colleague, an internal company policy that you have to sign..

Can be about testing outside work, regular home things: a new bycicle, a new restaurant, cooking and tasting something, having a conversation about a particular subject, trying out a new type of music/concert, ordering and paying with a new payment method, having the order package be shipped to a different address with a different courier/carrier

There’s plenty of testing to do around us, if you try to get out of the ordinary! Don’t repeat the same things every single day and you might find yourself testing something!

 

[stefan]

A lot of our discussions are about software testing. Anyone else not testing software?

Context can be really diferent when interpretting this question.

Can be about doing various other roles: test-management, project management, release management,business analysis, system analysis, checks automation.

Can be about doing additional activities which aren’t about software testing a product: workshops, presentations, blog posts, trainings, trying tools, poc of various technologies,

Can be about testing something else other than software: a process, a requirements document, a workshop’s meeting minutes, a test-strategy or plan from another colleague, an internal company policy that you have to sign..

Can be about testing outside work, regular home things: a new bycicle, a new restaurant, cooking and tasting something, having a conversation about a particular subject, trying out a new type of music/concert, ordering and paying with a new payment method, having the order package be shipped to a different address with a different courier/carrier

There’s plenty of testing to do around us, if you try to get out of the ordinary! Don’t repeat the same things every single day and you might find yourself testing something!

[Mark]

What has long been called “non-functional testing” often embraces more than software (or perhaps I should say ‘software under test’, because most infrastructure also runs software in all but the physical wires).  The physical aspects, manual processes, time factors, etc.   For example, but not exhaustively:

1.  Deployment (sometimes automated with software, but also frequently manual)

• Accuracy
• Repeatability
• Speed
• Validation
• Etc

2.  Back-Up and Restore (again the back-up software, schedules, etc), but also:

• Media
• Media storage (on-site, off-site)
• Media recall
• SLA & service responsiveness
• Granularity of restore

3.  Scalability

• Ability to grow, physically over time or on demand
  • Hardware
  • Database
  • Infrastructure
• Load balancing (usually software / hardware combination)

4.  Resilience

• Ability of infrastructure to recover from minor outages
  • infrastructure
  • host computers
  • SLA
  • etc

5.  Disaster Recovery

• Recovery from major outages, ie to new site or new hardware, etc
• SLA

6.  Archiving & Retrieval

Often not a part of the SUT, but what to do when data is ‘out of life’

• regulatory requirements and subsequent regulatory change
• archiving at the appropriate time
  • the death moment of a piece of data
  • regulatory time limit
  • exceptions – eg on-going complaint
  • etc

7.  Security

• Physical
• Infrastructure

8.   Interoperability

SUT and how it fits with all other operational systems within an organisation.

The time element of dependencies & what happens in the event of dependency not being met

9.  Operational Readiness

• Handover
• Documentation
• Alerting, Logging & Monitoring

 

….. and there are probably more

[Mark]

REQUIREMENTS

Whether stories, traditional requirements or change requests.

• Clear
• Unambiguous
• Testable
• Singular
• etc

[Archana]

Coming from an electronics background, I have done PCB testing during my college days

[Author]

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