Fundamentals of Software Testing

This coming weeking I plan to discuss various topics in software testing. Today I am going to cover the fundamentals. Unfortunately, I do not recall formal testing being taught in college. My experience has come from on-the-job lessons learned.

To start with you should have at least three classes of servers. Your company and budget may be small. In that case the development and staging server could potentially share the same box.

TYPES OF SERVERS

• Development Servers
• Staging Servers
• Production Servers

A development server is a server on which code is developed. Once development is completed, then it is installed on a staging server. A staging server should match the production server as closely as possible. This includes, the same version of operating system, the same software and the same configuration. The staging server is your last chance to discuss bugs before it hits the production server. The production server is the server that runs your code live. It is what your customer uses.

By seperating the servers in this way you can test on the staging server and develop on the development server. This is particularly useful if the test takes a long time. The developers can start working on bug fixes even before all of the tests complete.

Stayed tuned for tomorrow's topic: Unit Testing

Posted at 1:29 PM