In these tough times, the well-being of customers and employees is the most important for every organization. During this unexpected crisis, there are teams working from home while there are few workplaces that have reduced workforce. It is a given that the thoughts, efficiency and availability of your team will not be the same as you may expect otherwise. In these conditions, it is vital that the robustness of your software is not compromised.

A test framework is a set of guidelines which can be followed to create test cases and related processes. These guidelines can be about coding practices, storage and retrieval of test data and test results, interaction with external resources and many other things. A test framework usually contains internal libraries and reusable code modules which provide a foundation for test automation and can be leveraged to build test automation systems for different types of applications.

Adding new functionalities into an existing application or making new code changes due to bug fixes can possibly result in new issues in a software application. QA teams need to follow different procedures to ensure no new issues have been introduced due to code changes. Regression testing is a test approach which helps testers make sure there are no new bugs due to code changes or because a new functionality was added to an existing one.

Regression testing comprises re-running the test cases of already stable features and finding out if the new code changes attributed to the new release led to any negative impacts on the existing functionalities. With the amount of data flow across multiple modules in applications being made today, a feature addition or a fix can cause unexpected issues in the normal system operations.

A bug is the most important entity in the software testing life cycle. Priority and Severity are the most important attributes assigned to a bug and yet these are the most misunderstood ones too. When properly used, these properties help in the effective execution of the bug fixing and release scheduling process. Whenever a new bug is encountered, the bug is logged by a tester or a customer.

Regression testing is the process of verifying that if a change is made in one component of the product, the other components of the product continue to behave like it was before. It is a means to ensure that change in one functionality of the product doesn’t result in unintentional changes in other functionalities of the product.

Artificial intelligence works on the principle of human intelligence. The machines are programmed in such a way that they think like humans and can imitate our actions. They can be designed to execute all types of tasks from complex to simple ones. The primary task machines can perform are learning, reasoning and perception.

According to Wikipedia, “Functional testing is a quality assurance process and a type of black-box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of the software component under test. Functions are tested by feeding them input and examining the output, and the internal program structure is rarely considered.” Functional testing is a Black Box technique in which the output is validated against the input provided to the application.

Smoke, Sanity & Regression testing are the basic testing concepts, which most QA teams/projects follow in different stages of software development. Anyone new to the QA process needs to know the basics of Smoke, Sanity & Regression testing for efficient and good Quality Assurance results. Let’s discuss more about the importance & usage of these testing concepts below.

According to IEEE Std 829-1998, Software Testing is defined as “the process of analyzing a software item to detect the differences between existing and required conditions (i.e. defects) and evaluating the features of the software items.” With the advent of new technologies and new software being released every day, software testing is gaining more strength and accolades. Today, testing is imperative and there is no way we can skip it.