There are different types of QA testing services to ensure that your code works as expected. There are several approaches to testing and different practices which differ from each other. It is important to understand your business needs and requirements before finalizing type of QA.
Manual vs. automated testing
There are broad levels of testing manual and automated testing. As indicative of name, manual testing is done by a person who navigates or checks the software and APIs with relevant tools. It involves setting up an environment and executing tests. However, this method can be prone to error as the tester might make mistakes such as missing out on certain steps in the test script.
Automated tests are conducted by a machine which executes a test script written in advance based on the level of complexity. Whether it is checking a single method in a class or performing a sequence of complex actions, automated testing ensures consistency of results. It’s reliable compared to automated tests as quality of automated tests depends on test scripts written.
Automated testing is a great way to scale your QA process as you add new features to your application. But there’s still value in doing some manual testing with what is called exploratory testing as we will see in this guide.
The different types of tests
Unit tests
UNIT TESTING is a level of software testing to test individual units/components of software. The core purpose remains validation of each unit of the software. A unit is the smallest testable part of any software. It usually has one or a few inputs and usually a single output.
Integration tests
INTEGRATION TESTING verifies different modules or services where different modules or services are combined and tested as a group. The main reason behind this testing is to identify errors in the interaction between integrated units. Integration tests can turn out to be more expensive as it requires different parts of the application to function seamlessly.
Functional tests
Functional tests purely focus on business requirements of an application to verify the output of an action and do not check the intermediate states of the system when performing that action.
End-to-end tests
End-to-end testing replicates a user behavior with the software in a complete application environment. It verifies various user flow work and can be as simple as loading a web page or logging in more complex scenarios verifying email notifications, online payments.
End-to-end tests are very useful, but they’re expensive to perform and can be hard to maintain when they’re automated. It is recommended to have a few key end-to-end tests and rely more on lower level types of testing (unit and integration tests) to be able to quickly identify breaking changes.
Acceptance testing
Acceptance tests verify whether a system meets its business requirements. However, it requires entire application to be up and running and focus on replicating user behaviors, as well as measure the performance of the system and reject changes if certain goals are not met.
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