Errors in software systems are inevitable. They can be caused by a variety of factors, including human error, hardware failure, or software bugs. Testing a software helps in finding errors early, It is important to find errors as early as possible to avoid any sort of issues in production.
Let’s explore some checkpoints in which errors can be found early.
Build Time
- Compiler performs a syntax check on the code and reports any errors.
- It includes type checking to ensure that the types of variables are used correctly.
- The limitations depends on the language and compiler, on how much it can check.
Unit Testing
- Unit tests are written to test individual units of code.
- It helps in finding errors in the code logic. Unit tests works like a double entry book keeping system.
Integration Testing
- Integration tests helps to check if different systems are interacting correctly, and if the data is being passed correctly.
- It is very helpful to find errors in systems which are dynamically typed and the cases of interactions needs to be valid.
Load Testing
- Load tests help us to find errors in the system when it is under heavy load.
- We verify if the system is able to handle the incoming requests and if it is able to respond within the expected time.
- It also helps identify the limits of the system.
End-to-End Testing
- End-to-End tests are mostly used to test the entire system from start to finish in a user-like environment.
- It helps find errors in a user point of view, while using the system.
- typically for e2e systems, we deploy the whole system and have another software interact with it like a user.
It’s a good practice to have a combination of these tests to find errors early in the development process. It becomes crucial to run more tests as the system grows and becomes more complex.