Test Types

Last week I wrote about what is testing and how much is enough.  This week's post will be about a few types of tests used by testers.  There are many types of tests out there but there are a few main ones that I can think of right now including compatibility, regression, acceptance, alpha, beta, and performance testing.




Compatibility testing tests for a software's ability to run consistently well with other applications, and on many different operating systems, or browsers.  in other words this is a way to see if a software will work on a PC, Mac, or tablet in the way it is intended to, or if the product is a website if it will work well in IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc.




Regression testing is done after a tester has submitted bugs and the programmers have come up with a fix for it and the tester goes into the system again and looks for bugs in the area that the original bug was found.  This is done to make sure that the improvements have not created any new bugs in the system, and that the solution to the original bug actually solved the problem.


Acceptance testing is done to ensure that the requirements or specifications of the product are met, and in the case of software this can be done through performance testing which is done to see how a software performs in terms of responsiveness and stability under a particular workload. It can also serve to investigate, measure, validate or verify other quality attributes of the system, such as scalability, reliability and resource usage.


Alpha and beta testing are actually interconnected as Alpha testing is what is done at the developer's site by testers to see if it's ready for release.  Beta testing is usually done after Alpha testing and is when the company releases a sort of 'demo' version of the software to the public to see if ordinary users can find any additional bugs in the system.