How Do You Test Your Software?

Question

I'm currently working on 2 software projects:

1. A Social Networking Web Site for an NGO
2. A Patient Management System for a hospital

Although I've been programming for 5 years, I can't just say that I'm very good at testing or Test Driven Designing an application.

How would you arrange your Software Testing before coding phase, during coding and after you finished the coding phase for

• a. providing stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test.
• b. providing an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation.

and how do you understand that your program/application/product

• c. meets the business and technical requirements that guided its design and development
• d. works as expected

p.s. please feel free to edit the question since my english is not very powerful.

Answer 1

I would recommend googletest: "Google C++ Testing framework" to create test modules for your applications.

Here's the description from project's page:

Google's framework for writing C++ tests on a variety of platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Cygwin, Windows CE, and Symbian). Based on the xUnit architecture. Supports automatic test discovery, a rich set of assertions, user-defined assertions, death tests, fatal and non-fatal failures, value- and type-parameterized tests, various options for running the tests, and XML test report generation.

I haven't used this tool myself, but you can read an overview of this framework -- there is a good introductory paper on IBM's developerWorks site: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-googletestingframework.html

Cheers.

Answer 2

Hey.
First I would find tester that will do that for you.
Second, I would try to run those projects in agile way, or at least withs as much customer interaction as possible. In the end he says is it good, or not.

This professional tester, would need to work with you and client to ensure that requirements are clear. To verify that app is conforming those requirements. He would help you to identify areas that may be troublesome for user (if a user can't comprehend application, application it is defect in design). Tester would need to examine application to double check application (there is always possibility that some defect slipped through your tests/attention). Tester would create documentation providing what situations were checked, and how application behaves in this cases.