How much testing is enough?

When we go market to buy a product, which product would you like to buy, a completed tested or a partially tested. No body wants to have a partially or no tested product. But is it possible to test the whole product? Let’s understand this with a login page example; a login page has generally two textboxes, one for user name and other for password. Now, if you have given 2 valid username and password to test then you can try entering both and can test the application. But what if you have thousands of username and password? Are you going to test the system with each and every username and password?

Exhaustive testing is impossible, but we can always try to design our test cases in such a way that they are as per time, budget and other technical aspects of the product.

Testing and quality

Testing help us to measure the quality of software in terms of the number of defects found, the tests run, and the system covered by the tests. Testing can give confidence in the quality of the software.

Of course, a poor test may uncover few defects and leave us with a false sense of security. A well-designed test will uncover defects if they are present and so, if such a test passes, we will rightly be more confident in the software and be able to assert that the overall level of risk of using the system has been reduced and we can gain confidence on the quality of the software.