Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the software product or service under test.[1] Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include the process of executing a program or application with the intent of finding software bugs (errors or other defects), and verifying that the software product is fit for use.
Software testing is a set of processes aimed at investigating, evaluating and ascertaining the completeness and quality of computer software. Software testing ensures the compliance of a software product in relation with regulatory, business, technical, functional and user requirements.
Software testing is also known as application testing.
Source: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/17681/software-testing
Software testing is the process of evaluating and verifying that a software product or application does what it is supposed to do. The benefits of testing include preventing bugs, reducing development costs and improving performance.
There are many different types of software tests, each with specific objectives and strategies:
Acceptance testing: Verifying whether the whole system works as intended.
Integration testing: Ensuring that software components or functions operate together.
Unit testing: Validating that each software unit performs as expected. A unit is the smallest testable component of an application.
Functional testing: Checking functions by emulating business scenarios, based on functional requirements. Black-box testing is a common way to verify functions.
Performance testing: Testing how the software performs under different workloads. Load testing, for example, is used to evaluate performance under real-life load conditions.
Regression testing: Checking whether new features break or degrade functionality. Sanity testing can be used to verify menus, functions and commands at the surface level, when there is no time for a full regression test.
Stress testing: Testing how much strain the system can take before it fails. Considered to be a type of non-functional testing.
Usability testing: Validating how well a customer can use a system or web application to complete a task.
In each case, validating base requirements is a critical assessment. Just as important, exploratory testing helps a tester or testing team uncover hard-to-predict scenarios and situations that can lead to software errors.
Even a simple application can be subject to a large number and variety of tests. A test management plan helps to prioritize which types of testing provide the most value – given available time and resources. Testing effectiveness is optimized by running the fewest number of tests to find the largest number of defects.
The Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) includes a number of steps that have been completed in sequence. Even though some of these steps can vary, in general the main sequence of steps are the following:
Requirement Analysis
Planning the test
Developing the test case
Setting up the test environment
Executing the test
End of test, or closing the test cycle
Source: https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-a-software-testing-life-cycle-phases-process.html
The topics below provide high-level considerations of testing phases: