Software Testing involves a cycle for testing is called Software Development Life Cycle

Software Development Life Cycle:

It is a procedure to develop the software.It is a process of creating or altering systems and the models and methodologies that people use to develop these systems.Any SDLC should result in a high quality system that meets or exceeds customer expectations, reaches completion within time and cost estimates, works effectively and efficiently and is inexpensive to maintain and cost effective to enhance.

There are different Models, One of the primitive model is.....

Water Fall Model: It is free flow model, just like water flow it involves stages as shown below

Water Flow Model

Requirements Collection :-

- done by Business Analysts and Product Analysts

- gathering requirements

- translates business language into software language

For ex, let us consider the example of a banking software.

Feasibility Study :-

- done by software team consisting of project managers, business analysts, architects, finance, HR, developers but not testers

- architect – is the person who tells whether the product can be developed and if yes, then which technology is best suited to develop it.

- here we check for,

                                 - technical feasibility

                                 - financial feasibility

                                 - resource feasibility

Design :-

There are 2 stages in design,

                                                HLD – High Level Design

                                                LLD – Low Level Design

HLD – gives the architecture of the software product to be developed and is done by architects and senior developers

LLD – done by senior developers. It describes how each and every feature in the product should work and how every component should work. Here, only the design will be there and not the code.

For ex, let us consider the example of building a house.

Coding / Programming :-

- done by all developers – seniors, juniors, freshers

- this is the process where we start building the software and start writing the code for the product.

Testing :-

- done by test engineers

- it is the process of checking for all defects and rectifying it.

Installation :-

- done by installation engineers

- to install the product at a client’s place for using after the software has been developed and tested.

For ex, consider the example of a software to be developed and installed at Reliance petrol bunk.

Maintenance:-

- here as the customer uses the product, he finds certain bugs and defects and sends the product back for error correction and bug fixing.

- bug fixing takes place

- minor changes like adding, deleting or modifyingy small feature in the software product

Major drawback of waterfall model – testing is a small phase which is done after coding. Requirement is not tested, design is not tested, if there is a bug in the requirement, it goes on till the end and leads to lot of re-work.

Advantages of waterfall model – requirements do not change nor does design and code, so we get a stable product.

Applications of waterfall model :-

Used in – developing a simple application

              - for short term projects

              - whenever we are sure that the requirements will not change