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How Many Types of Software Testing Are There?
Jan 14, 2021
In today’s world, there’s a seemingly endless selection of software applications to choose from. Consumers know this, and they refuse to settle for software that’s buggy and unreliable. Instead, they want software that’s been thoroughly tested to ensure that it’s functioning as intended and meeting all specified digital product design requirements, which is where the process of software testing comes in.
But despite how critical software testing has become, not many people apart from professional software testers know that there are over a hundred different types of software testing and understand the differences between them. This article is here to fix that, providing a complete list of types of software testing and explaining the major ones.
What is software testing?
Software testing is the evaluation of software to find if it behaves as expected and meets all business and technical requirements.
Because fixing software problems early is much easier than fixing them in the later stages of software development, software testing can save developers and the customer money in the long run, making it cost-effective.
Without software testing, there would be no way to guarantee that a software application doesn’t contain critical vulnerabilities that cybercriminals could exploit to get access to sensitive data. It’s widely known that even a single data breach can irreparably damage an organization’s reputation, so using software that hasn’t been tested would be suicidal.
Complete list of different types of software testing
1. A/B Testing 2. Acceptance Testing 3. Accessibility Testing 4. Active Testing 5. Ad-hoc Testing 6. Agile Testing 7. Alpha Testing 8. Android Testing 9. Application Programming Interface-API Testing 10. Application Resiliency Testing 11. Automation Testing 12. Availability Testing 13. Back to Back Testing 14. Backend Testing 15. Backward Compatibility Testing 16. Banking Application Testing 17. Benchmark Testing 18. Beta Testing 19. Big Bang Integration Testing 20. Big Data Testing 21. Black Box Testing 22. Bottom-Up Approach 23. Boundary Value Analysis 24. Breadth Testing 25. Build Verification Test 26. Business Intelligence Testing 27. Business Process Testing 28. Cause and Effect Graph Testing 29. Checklist Based Testing 30. Cloud Testing 31. Code Based Testing 32. Code Free Testing 33. Combinatorial Testing 34. Comparison Testing 35. Compatibility Testing 36. Computer Aided Software Testing 37. Concurrent Testing 38. Configuration Testing 39. Confirmation Testing 40. Conformance Testing 41. Content Testing 42. Context-driven Testing 43. Continuous Testing 44. Cookie Testing 45. Cross Browser Testing 46. Cross-Platform Testing 47. Crowdsourced Testing 48. CRUD Testing 49. Data & Database Integrity Testing 50. Data-Driven Testing 51. Data Flow Testing 52. Data Migration Testing 53. Data Warehouse Testing 54. Destructive Testing 55. Development Testing 56. Documentation Testing 57. Durability Testing 58. Dynamic Testing 59. Ecommerce Testing 60. Efficiency Testing 61. End to End Testing 62. Endurance Testing 63. Equivalence Class Testing 64. ERP Testing 65. Exhaustive Testing 66. Experience-Based Testing 67. Exploratory Testing 68. Failover Testing 69. Feature Testing 70. Forced Error Testing
71. Functional Testing 72. Fuzz Testing 73. Game Testing 74. Gamma Testing 75. Globalization Testing 76. Gorilla Testing 77. Gray Box Testing 78. GUI Testing 79. Independent Testing 80. Installation Testing 81. Integration Testing 82. Interface Testing 83. Interoperability Testing 84. Interrupt Testing 85. Isolation Testing 86. Keyword-Driven Testing 87. Load Testing 88. Localization Testing 89. Loop Testing 90. Maintainability Testing 91. Maintenance Testing 92. Manual Testing 93. Mobile Testing 94. Model-Based Testing 95. Module Testing 96. Monkey Testing 97. Multivariate Testing 98. Mutation Testing 99. Negative Testing 100. Non-Functional Testing 101. Operational Testing 102. Orthogonal Array Testing 103. Pair Testing 104. Parallel Testing 105. Path Testing 106. Payment Gateway Testing 107. Penetration Testing 108. Pilot Testing 109. Portability Testing 110. Positive Testing 111. Progressive Testing 112. Protocol Testing 113. Rapid Testing 114. Real-Time Testing 115. Recovery Testing 116. Regression Testing 117. Reliability Testing 118. Requirements Testing 119. Risk-Based Testing 120. Sandwich Testing 121. Sanity Testing 122. Scalability Testing 123. Scenario Testing 124. Scrum Testing 125. Session-Based Testing 126. Smoke Testing 127. Spike Testing 128. Stability Testing 129. State Transition Testing 130. Static Testing 131. Storage Testing 132. Stress Testing 133. System Integration Testing 134. System Testing 135. Thread Testing 136. Transaction Testing 137. Unit Testing 138. Usability Testing. 139. Use Case Testing 140. User Acceptance Testing 141. Visual Testing
Major types of software testing explained
As you can see, there are more types of software testing than we could possibly talk about in greater detail in this article. However, you don’t actually need to know what each and every type of software testing is all about to have a good understanding of software testing in general. You just need to familiarize yourself with the major ones.
> Manual vs. automation testing
Software testing can be extremely time-consuming and repetitive, involving countless checks to see if all essential features of a software application work as intended. To make their lives just a bit easier, software testers often write test scripts to automate test execution using various automation testing tools, including Selenium, Visual Studio Test Professional, Telerik Test Studio, SoapUI, and Katalon Studio, just to name a few.
Automated software testing takes significantly less time than manual tests, and it’s also more reliable because there is no testing fatigue to worry about. They are, however, more expensive to prepare than manual tests, which is why they are not as cost-effective for small volume testing as manual tests.
Some types of software testing are easier to automate than others, including unit tests, which deal with the individual components of the software, and integration tests, which combine individual components and test them as a group. Usability testing, on the other hand, needs to be performed manually because machines are currently incapable of evaluating the ease of use and learnability of software applications.
> Static vs. dynamic testing
Static testing involves techniques such as inspection, walkthrough, technical review, and informal review to improve the quality of software products by finding errors in the early stages of the development cycle without actually executing any code. That’s why static testing is sometimes also called non-execution testing or verification.
Dynamic testing, on the other hand, involves code execution and techniques such as unit testing, integration testing, and system testing, the last of which is performed on the whole system. Dynamic testing is also known as execution testing or validation.
Whereas static testing is all about preventing problems, dynamic testing is about finding and fixing them. Because the return on investment of dynamic testing is not great, it’s important to spend enough time on static testing.
> White box vs. black box vs. grey box testing
Static testing is a great example of white box testing, also known as clear box testing, which is a type of software testing that’s performed with access to all source code and documentation. White box testing can be quick and effective, but it has its limitations because it can’t reveal flaws that are based on configuration problems.
That’s why it’s often performed alongside black box testing, in which software testers don’t have any knowledge of the architecture and no access to the source code. The best example of black box testing is security testing performed by an independent security professional.
If the hired security professional had access to some documentation, we would talk about grey box testing, which is a type of testing that involves at least some knowledge of the internals of a system.
> Functional vs. non-functional testing
Black box testing is a great example of a type of software testing that concentrates on the functionality of a system, which is why it’s also known as functional testing. Other examples of functional testing include interface testing, regression testing, and user acceptance testing, and what they all have in common is that they verify that each function of the software application in conformance with the requirement specification.
Non-functional testing checks non-functional aspects such as performance, usability, and reliability and evaluates them based on their quality. Examples of non-functional testing include documentation testing, installation testing, performance testing, and reliability testing.
Conclusion
The importance of software testing can be easily underestimated, but skipping this critical process is never a good idea because it’s almost guaranteed to affect the end product negatively. In this article, we’ve listed well over 100 different types of software testing and explained the major ones to help you understand that software testing is not an afterthought but an integral part of the software development process.
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