ISTQB Study Centre

Software Quality Assurance and Testing: An Emerging Employer Introduction The software quality assurance and testing segment was created out of the need to ensure that the application provided to a client operated according to requirements and was free of bugs. Though this segment has been around for decades, few analysts and development firms have paid much attention to the emerging market, until quite recently. In this article we will discuss the new employment potential facilitated by this emerging segment. The Importance of Quality Assurance and Testing in Software Development The need for companies to deploy software tools for maintaining competitiveness and enhancing productivity has propelled growth in the software development industry over most of the past decade. But as the complexity of applications increased, the possibility of bugs and boilerplate code in the new applications has also increased. To ensure that such bugs and unnecessary codes are identifie...

Tips for Building an Effective Software Testing Team Software Testing is one of those often-ignored areas of the development process, which often results in catastrophic failures for many firms. In recent years, some industry players have understood the need to invest in the development of skills required to ensure comprehensive analysis of new and/or modified solutions. This field, which is often included under the QA/QC Services category has been correctly recognized as a firm's last line of defense between launching a bug-free market-ready solution or a solution, which is doomed to fail. However, many organizations still ignore an important aspect of testing - it is not a one-man operation (unless it's a very small company) and in case of a team-based multi-man operation, it is important to develop the right mix of individuals who form the team to ensure success. Unlike many IT industry operations, a typical software testing team comprises of people from diff...

What Is Usability Testing? In this article, we will try to answer one of the frequently asked questions in software testing, and that is "What is usability testing?" This is one kind of validation where we test the system from user's perspective. The purpose of this is to check the following areas: Does the UI of the system meets all the user requirement or after using one time the user will never use the application again? Here typically first thing we check is the application navigation system to make sure all the pages or forms can be navigated from one to another without any error.  Next we check if the look and feel, screen labels are correct and unambiguous. Third all the standard windows controls are present. This is very important for the usability perspective as most of the users are used to with all the standard windows or browser controls and if some of them are missing or in the wrong place they may face difficulty to navigate through the a...