Software Testing Standards

Software Testing Standards

Unit 13 Software Testing

Recap Activity

Software Testing Methodologies

Learning objectives

 Understand what software testing standards are

 Explore different software testing standards such as:

 IEEE Standards Association

 Standards of ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119

Introduction:
– What is an
industry
standard?

Software Testing Standards

 Software testing standards are a set of rules or

standards that are expected to be met in a particular
product or service offered by a company.

 Compliance to these set of rules is important for a

company as it defines the extent to which a company
is performing its duty legally and is not engaged in any
sort of malpractice and guarantees delivery of high

quality products.

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Usefulness of Software Testing Standards

 Even though software testing standards are useful, you

will find as a software tester, that not all of these
standards may be relevant to your project.

 Software testing standards are of widely-varying

quality, so it is difficult to know which ones are worth
studying or applying.

BS 7925-1 – British Standards

 Software testing is defined in BS 7925-1 as the "process of exercising software to verify that

it satisfies specified requirements and to detect errors". As such, software testing is one way
of performing both software verification and software validation

 Obviously, verification and validation are not performed as stand-alone processes - there

has to be something to verify and validate. The verification and validation processes form
part of the larger process of software engineering.

 The shortcoming of BS 7925-1 is that it is somewhat biased towards component testing. It

originated as the definitions section of BS 7952-2 and so was initially purely devoted to
component testing, but has since been expanded to cover software testing in general.

ISO 12207 – International Standards Organization

 This is a standard that defines a framework for software throughout its life cycle,

which has been quickly accepted in the US - it has now been accepted as the
'umbrella', or integrating standard by the IEEE for their complete set of software
engineering standards.

 The test strategy, a high level document defining the test phases to be

performed for a programme is most likely to be influenced by this standards.

Multiple Choice

As a software tester, all industry standards will be relevant to your project?

• True

• False

Multiple Choice

Compliance to software testing standards can help achieve any 2 of the following

• High quality software

• Complete software

• Incomplete software

• Software that meets industry requirements

Multiple Choice

The BS 7925-1 is a software testing standard. What does BS mean?

• British Software

• British Standard

• British Software Testing

Multiple Choice

What a standard defines a framework for testing software throughout its life cycle?

• ISO 12207

• BS 7925-1

• TS 7920

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119

Divided into five different sections, each section of this testing standard has a different
purpose and need to serve as mentioned below:



ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-1

This software testing standard focuses on definitions and concepts of all other standards in
the 29119 series of quality standards. It helps user understand the vocabulary on which the
other standards in the series are built as well as provides relevant examples to show the way
in which each concept works in practice.

A complete knowledge bank, this standard can also be considered to be the foundation of
IEEE software testing standards. Some of the topics that are included in this series are
introduction to software testing, testing processes in SDLC, risk-based testing, common test
practices, defect management, etc.

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-2

This standard has been designed with an aim to develop a generic process model that can
be used for conducting testing in any SDLC.

As per this standard, the testing process will work on a three-layer process that would include
organizational test specifications such as organizational test policy and test strategy, test
management and dynamic testing.

Laying a special emphasis on alleviation of risks, this standard allows the process of testing to
focus on product’s key features and attributes under test.

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-3

With a special focus on documentation, this standard provides standardized templates that
are designed in a way that covers the entire SDLC. However, these templates can also be
customized as per each organization’s unique requirements.

Designed in alignment with the process defined in the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-2, this software
testing standard is likely to surpass the IEEE 829 standard.

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-4

With a focus on software test design techniques developed for organizations and SDLC
models, the techniques present in this standard can be an effective way to develop test
cases that can be used to present evidence that each requirement mentioned under test
have been successfully met or there are certain defects that need to be rectified.

Designed on the basis of BS-7925-2 component testing standard, this standard covers a
number of dynamic software testing techniques such as equivalence partitioning,
classification tree method and boundary value analysis.

ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-5

This standard supports those techniques and approaches that support keyword driven testing,
a technique that involves describing test cases on the basis of predefined set of keywords.

These keywords are based on a set of actions that are required to be performed using
specific steps in a test case. Writing keywords in a natural language helps one gain an easy
understanding of these test cases.

Implementing these standards may enable companies to deliver better products in the
market, a lot of these are encouraging to follow authentic and reliable software techniques
and approaches as a whole.

ISO/IEC 25000:2005

ISO/IEC 25000:2005 is commonly known as the standard that provides the guidelines for
Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). This standard helps in organizing
and enhancing the process related to software quality requirements and their evaluations. In
reality, ISO-25000 replaces the two old ISO standards, i.e. ISO-9126 and ISO-14598.

SQuaRE is divided into sub-parts such as −

 ISO 2500n − Quality Management Division

 ISO 2501n − Quality Model Division

 ISO 2502n − Quality Measurement Division

 ISO 2503n − Quality Requirements Division

 ISO 2504n − Quality Evaluation Division

Conclusion

 Finally, for those who do pick up a standard, please note that standards are generally in

two parts; first a normative part, which defines what the user must comply with, and then
an informative part, which includes guidance on the normative part.

 The nature of standards is that the normative part is difficult to read. Before throwing it

away, try the informative part, which is generally the most useful.

SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT