Optimal Software Testing Strategies - Extract

Abstract

There are innumerous functional requirements for software today that selecting an optimal testing strategy is imperative, especially for small and medium software entrepreneurs, in order to produce high quality software. This research work aims at determination of an optimal testing strategy for a software product and recommend the same for the selected software product. We identified three important criteria- effectiveness, efficiency & total cost of ownership. In a closed system, all others being equal, the above criteria determine which strategy is optimal. The determination methodology that will use the criteria mentioned above, was also created. Two strategies that are frequently used in the software industry were chosen for this purpose: The traditional testing strategy used in the waterfall model of software development and agile development testing strategy , which is widely being used now. The test subject chosen is the Apartment administration module of the Apartment Management System (herein after called as AMS in the document), a java based software product. With the test subject, competing strategies and the method of determination in place, our research isolated the Apartment administration module of AMS, baselined the code and applied the two testing strategies in parallel to each baseline. From the results obtained from both models, we found that the efficiencies of both the strategies seem to be the same. However, Agile model scored better in effectiveness (there was less rework) and total cost of ownership (better gain for the cost incurred).