Software development project comes along with the specified deadlines, and with the considerable amount of time being spent on the development part, testing phase is left with no sufficient amount of time. As such, estimating the time and efforts required in the testing before starting with it may proves to be helpful in planning and organizing different testing activities so as to meet the given deadlines. Our article; software testability is all about this pre-testing process.
What is Software Testability?
It is the state of software artifact, which decides the difficulty level for carrying out testing activities on that artifact. These software artifacts may include software modules, UML models, requirements & design documents and software application itself.
It helps in determining the efforts that will be needed to execute test activities on a particular software artifact based on its testability. Efforts may be considered in terms of inputs required in testing such as coverage of testing scenarios, the number of test cases, time duration, test resources, etc.
It is, basically the fundamental attribute associated with each and every software artifact that enables to compute amount of effort required in performing testing. Lesser the testability, larger will be the efforts whereas greater testability ensures minimal efforts.
How to measure Software's Testability?
Below given are some of the heuristics through which software testability can be determined
Controllability: It defines the control over software and hardware behaviour and comp. Testers should be able to control each module or layers of the software, independently. The better our control, the more effective will be testing.
Observability: You can't test unless & until you perceive something. You can only test, what is visible to you. It is related to observation of states and factors affecting the output of the software.
Availability: It defines the availability of the objects or entities, to carry out the testing. This may include software product evolution at various stages of development, bugs in the software, access to the source code, etc.
Simplicity : The simplicity makes everything easier to use. Lesser efforts are required in testing the simple software product. The simplicity of software may depend upon its functional, structural and code simplicity.
Stability: Lesser the changes, better will be the testing. The software product should be stable enough and does not require frequent modification in it. It also examines that changes (if any needed), should be controlled and communicated.
Key Benefits of Software Testability
Provides ease to test engineers, to estimate the difficulty, in exploring the defects in the software product.
Decides the scope of automated testing on the software product, based on its controllability.
Increased in testability ensures the easy and early detection of bugs, thereby saves both time and cost.
Calculates, minimizes and control the efforts needed by the testers, to perform testing.
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