What is Integration Testing? Types, Tools and Strategies – W3Softech

Integration Testing

The process of testing the combination of units or integrated units of a system or product is called Integration Testing. It is the second level of software testing and helps to test the multiple modules of software written by different level of programmers. It is also said to be String Testing or Thread Testing. Also one of the levels of testing usually performed by developers or software testers.

Working Process of Integration Testing

• The initial step is to prepare the tests plan
• To design the test cases, test scenarios and test scripts
• To execute the test cases
• Optimize the test cases
• To perform re-testing to ensure that the system is defect-free

Integration Testing Types/Strategies/Approaches

There are 4 different testing approaches namely

• Big Bang Approach
• Top-Down Approach
• Bottom-Up Approach
• Hybrid/Sandwich Approach

Integration Testing Approaches – W3Softech

Big Bang Approach:

Big Bang Approach is nothing but testing by combining all the functional units at the group. This approach will take place after receiving the software at once.

Top-Down Approach

Here top-level units are going to be tested first later lower level units will be tested one by one. This approach takes help of Test Stubs to perform testing on lower level units

Bottom-Up Approach

It is quite opposite to the Top-Down Approach. This approach takes help of Test Drivers to perform testing on top level units

Hybrid/Sandwich Approach

This approach is the combination of both Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches. Here top-level units and lower level units are tested. It takes the help of both test stubs and test drivers

Top 15 Integration Testing Tools

• Citrus
• eZscript
• FitNesse
• Jasmine
• LDRA
• Pioneerjs
• Protractor
• Rational Integration Tester
• SMART INTEGRATION TEST ACCELERATOR (SITA)
• Spock for JAVA
• Steam
• TESSY
• Validate MSG
• VectorCAST/Ada
• VectorCAST/C++

Reference: What is Integration Testing? Types, Tools and Strategies – W3Softech

What is Unit Testing? Unit Testing Tools and Types | W3Softech

Unit Testing

The process of testing the individual units of software is called Unit Testing. It will be done during the development of a software application. According to the programming procedure, a unit may be an individual function of the software.

Unit Testing is one of the levels of software testing and usually done by the developer. It is the first level of testing. Developers or QA Engineers will handle this testing.

Working Process of Unit Testing

• With the help of this testing, we can fix bugs or errors during the development cycle
• It enables developers to make changes quickly and saves cost
• It helps to get a good quality software product

Unit Testing Types

It is of two types namely Manual or Automated.

Most probably performed by manually but developers always prefer to do automation testing. It is a white box testing technique comes under following test coverage techniques

• Branch Coverage
• Condition Coverage
• Decision Coverage
• Statement Coverage

Using White box testing methods

• Test cases can be derived that all independent paths within a module have been exercised at least once.
• Exercise all logical decisions on their true and false sides.
• Executes all loops at their boundaries.
• Exercise internal data structures to assure their validity.

Unit Testing Tools

• JTest
• JUnit
• NUnit
• JMockit
• EMMA
• PHPUnit
• xUnit.net
• TestNG
• QuiltHTTP
• HTMLUnit
• EmbUnit
• SimpleTest
• ABAPUnit
• TypeMock
• LRDA
• Cantata
• Karma
• Jasmine
• Mocha
• Parasoft

Advantages

• Developers will be able to understand the functionality of the Unit API
• It helps the developers to rewrite and modify the code anytime and ensure the unit works as usual
• It helps to test each and every unit of the software application so that named as Unit Testing

Disadvantages

• It is very complicated to test each and every unit in large scale programs as it takes a lot of time
• There may be a chance of missing units or paths of code in trivial programs
• It allows testing only certain units or paths of code so that we are unable to grab the integration errors

What is Agile Testing? Agile Testing Methodology and Life Cycle | W3Softech

Agile Testing

          Agile Testing is a process of software testing which follows the agile software development principles. It is non-sequential but to start with continuous integration between testing and development. The main aim of agile testing is to achieve high-quality product within a short period of time. It consists of short time frames called iterations so that it is also called delivery driven approach.

Agile Model vs. Waterfall Model:

          Agile Model is used while working with an agile methodology and the waterfall model is adopted from a waterfall development approach. Both are different methods of software development process even though they are different but both are important based on the requirements and type of project. The major differences between the agile model and waterfall model are listed below

Agile Model	Waterfall Model
Testing process of agile model is unstructured compared to the waterfall model	Waterfall Model Testing process is structured with maximum planning
It is best suitable for small projects	It can handle all kind of projects
Agile Model helps to fix errors in the middle of the project as it starts with the beginning of the project	In the waterfall model, errors need to fix from the beginning of the project as it tests at the end of the project
As agile testing contains short time frames it requires less documentation for the testing process	Whereas waterfall testing requires big data of documentation for the testing process
Agile testing can take place at every stage of project development	Waterfall testing is able to begin only after completion of project development
Here testers can work along with developers	Here testers and developers need to work separately
To analyze the project requirements testers need to maintain communication with developers	Here there is no need for any communication between developers and testers as they work separately
In the agile model, acceptance is able to perform at the end of every sprint	In the waterfall model, user acceptance can perform only at the end of the project

Agile Testing Methodology:

As there are a number of methods available for agile testing, these two plays a major role in the development process

Test Driven Development:

• It uses tests to direct and drive the development process to write an automated test before writing the code. There are two levels of testing available here namely Unit Testing and Acceptance Testing
• Unit Testing comes under white-box tests which confirm developers expectation of developing the code with the help of tools usually xUnit Framework tool
• Whereas Acceptance testing comes under black-box testing which confirms the customer’s expectation of system capability with the help of tools usually FIT Tool
• It helps to run all the tests whenever new code is checked-in at all the time

Continuous Integration:

• It keeps the main development code-line clean to ensure that the whole product works correctly on the whole time to provide a high quality product
• Both tests such as Unit and Acceptance Tests are going to execute whenever any new code is checked-in to build 100% defect-free code-line
• TDD helps to make sure that your own code is correct whereas CI make sure that code-line is defect-free without any regression

Advantages and Disadvantages of Agile Model:

Advantages	Disadvantages
It helps to make good communication between testers and developers	Need highly skilled testers and developers to analyze the project requirements
Agile Model consumes less money and time	Only suitable for small projects
It is very flexible to use and easily adaptable to changes	This Testing process required unstructured data with minimum planning
Any changes can be made in the middle of the development process	Sometimes it may get failed due to lack of software deliverables

Agile Testing Life Cycle:

Requirements:

Gathering basic requirements for a project to move it into an agile development process. It helps to make perfect planning to start a project

High-level planning:

Make perfect planning to begin a project with the help of testers and developers

Designing:

Make sure to establish perfect communication between testers and developers so that we get the best design of a project

Development:

After successful completion of designing, we need to move the project into development for better output

Test:

Here is the major step takes place which is Test. The complete project needs to be tested to make it defect-free

Deliver:

Need to deliver the project to the customer within the required period of time

Review:

After successful delivery once review the working practices of the project and make sure it is fine

Feedback:

Finally, take feedback from the customer to improve the next deployment cycle

Agile Testing Life Cycle - W3Softech

Agile Testing Tools:

Top 20 agile testing tools that are most widely used

• CruiseControl
• Gretel
• Hudson
• JAZZ
• Jester
• Jira
• JMeter
• Junit
• JunoOne
• Nunit
• Pivotal Tracker
• Practitest
• QMetry
• qTest Scenario
• Selenium WebDriver
• SoapUI
• TestCocoon
• TestRail
• VersionOne
• Zephyr

What is Big Data Testing? Big Data Testing Tools and Types | W3Softech

Big Data Testing:

Big Data Testing is the process of testing applications which contains Big Data. Here, Big Data in the sense collection of large data sets that are too hard to handle by traditional data computing applications. Datasets involve a wide range of tools, techniques and frameworks to process the application testing. Performance Testing and Functional Testing are key elements of Big Data Testing.

In the process of this testing, testers need to verify the processing of terabytes of data using supportive components. It involves checking various characteristics such as accuracy, conformity, consistency, data completeness, duplication, validity, etc.,

Big Data Testing is divided into three steps

Step 1: Data Staging Validation

• In the first step, a large amount of data should be validated from a wide range of sources like RDBMS, Social Media, Weblogs, etc., to ensure that data is correctly pulled into the system
• It compares the data pushed into the Hadoop with the source data to ensure that they both are matching
• It helps to verify the data which is extracted and pushed into correct HDFS location

Step 2: MapReduce Validation

In the second step, QA engineers or testers need to verify the business logic validation among every node and need to validate them after running over multiple nodes. Here MapReduce validation works based on Map procedure which performs filtering and sorting whereas Reduce procedure performs a summary operation

• It ensures that application process works properly
• Implementing the data based on data aggregation rules
• Make sure validating the data after the process of MapReduce

Step 3: Output Validation Phase

The third step in big data testing is the output validation phase. In this final step, the output files are created and moved to a Data Warehouse system or to any other system depending on requirements

• It helps to check whether the transformation rules applied correctly or not
• It validates the data integrity and data load into the system
• Helps to ensure the data free from corruption by comparing the HDFS system data with target data

• 

  Big Data Testing - W3Softech

Difference between Traditional Database Testing and Big Data Testing:

Properties	Traditional Database Testing	Big Data Testing
Data	Here tester able to work with structured data	Here tester able to work with structured and unstructured data
Approach	In this type, the testing approach is well defined and time-tested	Here testing approach requires focused R&D efforts
Infrastructure	As the system size is limited there is no need for any special test environment	It just requires a special test environment as it contains large datasets usually in terms of TeraBytes
Validation Tools	In these types, for system validation testers use macros or automation tools	It uses different types of tools based on the big data cluster

Different Types of Big Data Testing Tools:

Big Data Cluster	Big Data Testing Tools
MapReduce	Cascading, Flume, Hadoop, Hive, Kafka, MapR, Oozie, Pig, S4
NoSQL	Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, MongoDB, Redis, ZooKeeper
Processing	BigSheets, Datameer,  Mechanical Turk, R, Yahoo! Pipes
Servers	EC2, Elastic, Google App Engine, Heroku
Storage	Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), S3

Reference: What is Big Data Testing? Big Data Testing Tools and Types - W3Softech

What is Cloud Testing? Cloud Testing Tools and Types | W3Softech

Cloud Testing

Cloud Testing is defined as the process of testing Cloud Computing Services like Software, Hardware and other Remote Services. It is one of the Types of Software Testing generally used to perform on all cloud testing services.

Objectives of Cloud Testing:

• The major objective is to reduce the execution time of testing for large applications
• It helps in reduction of cost
• More efficient and greater scalability
• Helps to increase the mobility

Cloud Computing is mainly divided into three categories namely IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):

The name itself says that it works on physical resources like storage, network devices, computing servers, etc., these resources are provided as per the user requirement. It is the first and most important category also called the building block of a cloud.

Platform as a Service (PaaS):

It is the second category of the cloud. It is also called as Application Platform as a Service or Platform Based Service. It helps customers to develop, run and manage applications without any interruption to OS and required middleware, etc.,

Software as a Service (SaaS):

Software as a Service also called On-demand software or Software plus services. It is the final category of cloud computing. It is simply defined as license-based software available to any user based on their required plan. Up to certain features, it is available for the free later user to need to pay and get full access. Examples are Windows OS, Adobe Photoshop, etc.,

Types of Cloud Testing - W3Softech

Types of Cloud Testing:

Cloud Testing is able to perform on both Functional Testing and Non-Functional Testing some of them are listed below

System Testing:

System Testing is performed to check whether all functions of the application are working properly or not under given system requirements

Interoperability Testing:

This testing determines the flexibility and compatibility of the application while changing from one infrastructure to other

Acceptance Testing:

It is the final stage of testing under functional testing to ensure that it meets the user expectations

Availability Testing:

Here the admin has to make sure that the cloud is available always as there may be sudden functions are going on which do not interrupt the user activity

Multi-Tenancy Testing:

This shows that the application should perform correctly while multiple users are trying to access the application at an instant time.

Performance Testing:

Performance Testing is of two types Load Testing and Stress Testing. It ensures that the application must accept the load and stress from N no. of user requests. To perform well the cloud need to have elasticity which increases the usage as required

Security Testing:

It helps to check the security of the cloud is accessible for only authorized users and data must be protected.

Disaster Recovery Testing:

As the data is available in cloud servers sometimes there may be a cause of system failure, data loss or extreme workload. So this testing helps to measure how fast the error got found and any data loss occurred.

Cloud Testing Tools:

Here we provide the list of most important cloud testing tools

• AppPerfect
• Cloud Assault
• CloudTestGo
• HP LoadRunner
• Jmeter
• Keynote
• LoadStorm
• Nessus
• Nmap
• Parasoft SOAtest
• SOASTA
• Wireshark

Reference: What is Cloud Testing? Cloud Testing Tools and Types - W3Softech