Introduction:
In software field, testing plays an important role in evaluating a system or its components with the intent to find whether it satisfies the specified technical and business requirements or not, as you may already know, software testing have different levels and phases through which the system under test goes through to ensure that it’s designed as expected with no major flaws. There are different types and techniques of software testing out there, where these activities can be categorized into static and dynamic testing activities, in this article we will be talking about dynamic testing.
Software Dynamic Testing:
Dynamic testing in software is the type of testing where the behavior of the system is analyzed while it’s working in different environments with different inputs and outputs, it’s always referred to as the validation part in the software cycle, as it’s mainly about making sure that the system and different outputs produced through the software cycle are done in the right way, meeting the technical and business requirements.
You may also like to read: Static Testing
Dynamic Testing Activities:
It’s commonly known that dynamic testing activities are only performed on execution phase in the software testing cycle or only to test the behavior of the code when it’s running, however such testing activities can be found at almost all phases of software testing life cycle, as mentioned above, this testing is mainly about validating that the object under test is the right object.
On test case designing phase, this testing activities can be applied by ensuring that test cases are derived correctly covering all requirements and scenarios, Test conditions are listed and taken into consideration.
While in the Testing environment and data setup, dynamic testing can validate that correct test data are collected or created, the Test environment is configured and set correctly matching production environment.
On execution phase, such testing ensures that test cases are actually executed correctly covering all business scenarios and requirements.
Reporting is an important part of the software testing lifecycle, summary, and defects report should contain the complete correct result, well detailed and matching standard reports template.
Levels of Testing:
Dynamic testing activities are not just about functional activities where we are concerned mainly with validating that all features are developed according to business requirements, but it also includes non functional testing activities where we are not mainly concerned with the functionality of the subject under test, but with the non-functional attributes such as response time, memory leaks, security and usability of the subject under test
This testing concepts and activities can be applied on different levels in the software cycle
Unit level: unit is the smallest unit forming the system, different units can go through dynamic testing to ensure that functional and non-functional attributes of different units are as expected, and as known in software testing principles, the earlier we find the defect, the less expensive it will be.
Integration level: Integration level testing can apply to integrating different units into one system, or one component, or by integrating different systems together forming a bigger system, individual units may be working well each on its own, but when combined, issues and defects may be found, such testing can be performed at integration level to ensure no problems were found after putting units together.
System level: testing on system level is performed to ensure that the system as a whole performs as expected meeting different business and technical requirements, these requirements can either be functional or non- functional requirements, such testing activities can ensure that these requirements are implemented.
Tools:
Now that we know that dynamic testing activities can be performed at different phases on different levels, tools can introduce to these activities to save time and effort, for example performance and support tools can include Dynamic Analysis tools can be used to find defects that are evident only when the software is executing, such as time dependencies or memory leaks, usually this type of tools is used on unit or unit integration level.
Conclusion:
Dynamic and static testing activities are both important in any software life cycle, each can find defects that can’t be found by the other, together both activities will eventually ensure that the system or object under test meets its requirements with the least number of issues and defects.
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