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Testing ○｜Definition｜1st｜20251122191714-00-⌔

Software testing - Wikipedia

Software testing

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Software testing is the act of checking whether software meets its intended objectives and satisfies expectations.

Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the quality of software and the risk of its failure to a user or sponsor or any other stakeholder.1

Software testing can determine the correctness of software for specific scenarios but cannot determine correctness for all scenarios.23 It cannot find all bugs.

Based on the criteria for measuring correctness from an oracle, software testing employs principles and mechanisms that might recognize a problem. Examples of oracles include specifications, contracts,4 comparable products, past versions of the same product, inferences about intended or expected purpose, user or customer expectations, relevant standards, and applicable laws.

Software testing can be functional or non-functional in nature.

Software testing is often dynamic in nature: running the software to verify actual output matches expected. It can also be static in nature: reviewing code and its associated documentation.

Software testing is often used to answer the question: Does the software do what it is supposed to do and what it needs to do?

Information learned from software testing may be used to improve the process by which software is developed.5

A commonly suggested approach to automated testing is the “test pyramid,” wherein most of the tests are unit tests, followed by a smaller set of integration tests and finally a few end-to-end (e2e) tests.678

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. Kaner, Cem (November 17, 2006). Exploratory Testing (PDF). Quality Assurance Institute Worldwide Annual Software Testing Conference. Orlando, FL. Retrieved November 22, 2014. ↩

  2. Pan, Jiantao (Spring 1999). “Software Testing” (coursework). Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved November 21, 2017. ↩

  3. Kaner, Cem; Falk, Jack; Nguyen, Hung Quoc (1999). Testing Computer Software (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-0-471-35846-6. ↩

  4. Leitner, Andreas; Ciupa, Ilinca; Oriol, Manuel; Meyer, Bertrand; Fiva, Arno (September 2007). Contract Driven Development = Test Driven Development – Writing Test Cases (PDF). ESEC/FSE’07: European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2007. Dubrovnik, Croatia. Retrieved December 8, 2017. ↩

  5. Kolawa, Adam; Huizinga, Dorota (2007). Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management. Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. ISBN 978-0-470-04212-0. ↩

  6. Cohn, Mike (2009). Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum. Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 978-0321579362. ↩

  7. Molina, Alessandro (2021). Crafting Test-Driven Software with Python: Write test suites that scale with your applications’ needs and complexity using Python and PyTest. Packt Publishing. ISBN 978-1838642655. ↩

  8. Fernandes da Costa, Lucas (2021). Testing JavaScript Applications. Manning. ISBN 978-1617297915. ↩

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