tappy

Web applications continue to evolve at an unbelievable pace, and the architecture surrounding web apps get more complicated all of the time. With the growth in complexity of the web application and the development process, web application testing also needs to keep pace with the ever-changing demands.

In my last blog, I investigated both the stateless and the stateful class of model-based testing. Both have some advantages and disadvantages. You can use them for different types of systems, depending on whether a stateful solution is required or a stateless one is enough. However, a better solution is to use an aggregate technique that is appropriate for each system. Currently, the only aggregate solution is action-state testing, introduced in the book Paradigm Shift in Software Testing. This method is implemented in Harmony.

In some sense, testing can be more difficult than coding, as validating the efficiency of the test cases (i.e., the ‘goodness’ of your tests) can be much harder than validating code correctness. In practice, the tests are just executed without any validation beyond the pass/fail verdict. On the contrary, the code is (hopefully) always validated by testing. By designing and executing the test cases the result is that some tests have passed, and some others have failed. Testers do not know much about how many bugs remain in the code, nor about their bug-revealing efficiency.

Software Risk Management (SRM) combines a set of tools, processes, and methods for managing risks in the software development lifecycle. In SRM, we want to make informed decisions about what can go wrong at various levels within a company (e.g., business, project, and software related).