Building software is a lengthy process involving numerous steps. The entire software development life cycle includes the tasks needed for developers and engineers to follow.
From design to development, the engineering team puts a lot of effort into designing and building the software. However, merely building working software is not sufficient for project completion.
Thorough testing and validation of the software, services, dependent components, and the entire platform are essential. That’s why the test engineers take over the platform validation part.
There are numerous platform validation test techniques that the test engineers use for efficient testing. These techniques ensure the software and the platform are completely error-free and work as intended without any issues.
If you are a software test engineer and want to explore these crucial platform validation techniques, we are glad to help. Let's examine a few commonly used techniques for test validation in the software industry.
What is Platform Validation Testing?
Platform Validation testing is a testing method or process to ensure the safety and usability of software platforms like operating systems, applications, firewalls, and many other things.
It’s a common type of testing method in the software industry. Validation testing is performed to check if the software, service, or platform performs as per the customer's requirements.
This method includes testing the features and finding the bugs, issues, security vulnerabilities, and loopholes in the software that might hamper the user experience.
Validation testing is different from verification testing, hence it comes at the end of the testing phase of the software.
Types of Platform Validation Test Techniques
Validation testing is an umbrella term and there are numerous test techniques included. Let’s take a look at these platform validation test techniques.
#1 - Functional Testing
Functional testing is a common type of software testing that is essential for platform validation. It focuses on the functional aspect of the software, service, or the entire platform.
This testing validates the functionality of the software program to know if it works in the intended way. As a part of validation testing, this testing confirms the features of the program or platform if it’s been already tested.
#2 - Unit Testing
Unit Testing is one of the most important parts of the validation testing techniques. In this test, the engineers perform the validation testing on the various parts of the software or the service.
This is commonly performed in the development phase to test the small chunks of codebase or the features one by one. In the validation phase, it’s performed to validate the original unit test results.
#3 - Performance Testing
Performance testing validates the speed, safety, scalability, and reliability of the software platform under immense load. The engineers put the artificial load on the software or service to see the maximum load that can be handled.
Also, it confirms the speed and reliability of the software programs under load. Using this testing technique is useful for high-end consumer software and services.
#4 - Security Testing
Validating the safety parameters of the software, service, or platform. With the testing of all the entry points and endpoints, the engineers can understand if there are any bugs, technical issues, or vulnerabilities.
This testing ensures the software is completely safe and secure for the customers to use without any issues. It’s done after fixing the majority of the bugs and vulnerabilities found in the testing completed during the development phase.
#5 - Regression Testing
Regression Testing is a part of system testing methodologies. This is the final part of the testing process and includes finding the bugs that can arise after making certain changes in the codebase.
This is done to find and fix the bugs that arise after making changes to fix the issues that were detected in the first few testing sessions. It ensures the old bugs are fixed and no new issues can affect the user experience.
#6 - User Acceptance Testing
User Acceptance Testing or UAT is a popular platform validation test technique suitable for identifying the user experience. In this test, the user experience is taken into feedback to make the software platform as usable as it can be.
In this test technique, the test engineers invite the customers for live feedback on the software platforms. The live feedback is beneficial to understanding the user-initiated bugs and errors, UI suggestions, and improving the experience.
Final Words
Software Platform Verification and Validation is a crucial part of the testing fundamentals followed in the software industry. The validation and verification testing are different methodologies, but both must be used in combination.
These platform test validation techniques are quite useful in the industry. Every test engineer must know all these techniques to ensure the software program, service, or platform is tested thoroughly before delivering it to the clients.