Software testing is a broad concept. It requires skill, experience and knowledge for anyone to excel in the field of software testing. Most of all, it is important to know the main objects and purposes of software testing.

The main objectives and purposes of software testing are given below

  • Finding defects in the software product that may have occurred during the development of the software due to human error
  • Gaining confidence and concluding the quality of the software developed
  • To prevent future defects from occurring
  • To ensure that the end product delivered meets all kinds of business and user agreements
  • To ensure that the developed product satisfies Business Requirement Specification (BRS) and System Requirement Specifications (SRS)
  • To gain customer’s confidence by delivering them a high quality product that has minimum defects possible

Software testing plays a great role in concluding whether the software application or product developed meets business and user agreements. It is extremely important to have very good test coverage criteria in order to completely and thoroughly test the software application or product and ensure that it performs as per the mentioned specifications.

While constructing the test coverage, the test cases should be so designed to have maximum possibility of finding errors and bugs within the software. Moreover, the test cases selected should be very effective. The effectiveness of this objective can be measured by monitoring the number of defects detected per test case. The higher number of defects detected per test case, the more effective the test case is.

Once the application or product is delivered to the client or users, they should be able to operate the software without facing any type of difficulties or problems. For this to happen, the tester should have the experience of knowing how the customers react to delivered software and what is their purpose of using the software. Only then, will he be able to write down the better test scenarios and design the most effective test cases. This plays an important role in fulfilling the customer requirements.

The main aim of software testing is to make sure that the testing process is done properly and the end result of the system is completely ready for use. Good coverage of testing indicates that the testing has been effectively done to cover as much area as possible. This also means that the software is checked for compatibility with the OS, hardware and various browsers, performance testing is done to test the performance of the application and also load testing is done to make sure that the system is reliable and should not crash due to some unforeseen error. It also makes sure that the application is deployed easily to the machine with no resistance and hence, the application is easy to install, know about and make use of.