I was appointed as System Analyst in Feb, 2006 to work for a completely new concept “Total Productive Maintenance” in my territory. The moment you are hired by a professional organization to work in a professional environment, the moment you start learning from each employee. The purpose of the module was to deploy productive maintenance software for spinning machines and certainly it was not an easy job.
I started with Foremen of the relevant departments to understand what we need to actually implement and finished the project within one and half year. I hold a professional degree in computer sciences and we need to take care of software engineering steps stated below for successful implementation of any software:
• Analysis
• Design
• Coding
• Testing
• Debugging
• Implementation
Each and every step mentioned above holds a priority and should be implemented with care for long term implementation of any software. Let us come to the important point we are about to focus in this article which is number four step in software engineering and most of the times is pronounced as software testing. It will be good to define the term before we proceed for explanation. The term software testing can be defined as:
“Software testing is an investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test.” Wikipedia
I am sure an IT guy who holds some experience working with software can easily understand the definition, but there should be something for new guy as well. Let me say you have been said to develop software for retail shop, the first step is to analyze the requirements of client, and to design them for as per the client and end user satisfaction in second step (see software engineering principals). Once you are finished with analysis and design, you need to take care of coding and certainly nothing can be perfect in one first step.
You will need to test your software for any error or bugs for all the processes you have implemented. This is fourth step of the software engineering. You will need to check the following to end with software testing process:
• Design and Development are as per the guidelines.
• Software is working as per expectations
• Can be implemented with the same characteristics
• It is enough to satisfy the client’s requirements
Software testing process can be the easy job for small retail kind of software but what if you are willing to deploy ERP in your spinning mill? You will need a complete software testing team to check the validity of the software. Most of the times companies working with big projects like ERP prefer to hire services from software testing company. Software Testing Companies make it sure that your product is reasonably fine to be deployed and implementing organization can rely on product.
There are many Software testing companies now days offering software testing services and certainly you can find the one for your needs as well. Just Google ‘Software Testing Company’ and choose the appropriate one for your product needs.
Contributed by Muhammad Junaid Iqbal