Are you aware of system testing, what are its roles, how it is performed and what are its pros and cons? System testing is a vast subject and includes various components like test environment set-up, test case creation, creating test data, etc. Automation system testing is helpful to test various criteria like speed and stability in the application which can not be compromised.
We will discuss in this post, what is System Testing, what are types of system testing and what are its pros and cons. So without further ado, let’s jump straight to it.
System Testing
System testing is one of the crucial types of testing which is performed on a whole integrated system and helps to evaluate the agreement of the software with the requirements. System testing is conducted after integration testing and is followed by acceptance testing where integrated testing passed components are considered as a unit. Its objective is to identify the bugs, errors and defects within the complete integrated units and the whole system.
System testing is generally carried out on the whole system in the following contexts; either on the system requirement specifications which is, on functional requirement specifications or on both contexts. This type of testing is used to check the behaviour and design of the whole system and the expectations of the customers.
System testing is conducted by the testers who are free from the development team and helps to determine the quality of the system impartially. So let’s share the different types.
Types of system testing
Performance Testing
Also known as ‘Perf Testing’; it is a type of non-functional system testing which is conducted to test the speed, stability, scalability and reliability of the product software application. The main objective of performance testing is to determine and eliminate the hold-up and the hindrance in the application software.
Speed- It demonstrates whether the software application responds immediately.
Scalability- It ascertains the maximum amount of load the software application is able to handle
Stability- as suggested, it determines if the software application is stable and able to perform well under the given load.
Load Testing
Load testing is exactly what its name suggests, it is the type of system testing which is conducted to check the behaviour of the software or a software application or the whole system under maximum (real-life based) load. It is crucial to determine the Software Development Life Cycle since it’s based on real-life load scenarios. For Example: Testing a printer by sending a large number of documents to be printed.
Stress Testing
Stress testing is a type of system testing which is many a time considered a part of load testing. It is conducted to test the robustness and durability of the system and software application under varying loads. Its objective is to determine the robustness, breaking point, stability and recoverability of the software application or the whole system.
Scalability Testing
Coming to scalability testing; it is a type of system testing which is performed to test out the performance of the system or software applications in respect of their capability to scale up or scale down the load of the number of users. Its main objective is to check the user limit of the product application, under a high load and to ensure a high-end user satisfaction
Advantages Of System Testing
- Extreme knowledge of programming is not required
- The entire software or product is tested to identify the errors and bugs which were not identified earlier during unit testing and integration testing
- The system testing environment is mostly similar to that of a real-life or business environment
- Helps to check the entire functionality of the system using different test scripts
Disadvantages Of System Testing
- A time-consuming process
- It’s a very costly type of testing as the whole system is checked
- A good debugging tool is required to identify the errors
Conclusion
We discussed system testing, its major types and its pros & cons above. It’s an efficient way to ensure that the product software is free of errors and works well under real-life loads and environments.
