I had a very informative conversation today with a software programmer who’s had a lot of experience in the field of computers. He gave me a very good list of the different types of software testers of existing industry. I thought this to be nice information to share for those that may be interested. Here are some of the types of software testers. I combined some of his comments are some observations of my own.

Smoke Testing is when you test the very foundation of a product working. Such is will the product. Turn on when you turn on the power will it load the operating system, etc. an example of this might be. When a server RPC goes down, you need to first start with the power source operating system to see if that’s contributing to the problem.

Feature Testing: is when you make sure that the new features that have been coded into the product or working as described.

Device Testing is when you test new features in a product. This may be specifically useful for ensuring that hardware is working properly with software.

Edge Cases working with is when you put intentionally try to mess up the product, such as if it’s asking for phone number you might put EN 12 digits to see how response to all the digits versus 10 or you might put EN 99999 to see how response to just all the same number. Here would be what you’d put in information that the product would not be expecting

Regression Testing: this is where people look for legacy bugs that may be deeply within the product is also a place where you can test new features of the product

Automated Testing: this area, testing, use involves programmers as well as software testers were they create algorithms to try to cause a product to not work to specs. A lot of times, programmers will write applications geared to break other products.

Edge or Scale Testing: may have to do with how many users will use the product simultaneously, and if the product slows down by the number of users.

Compatibility Testing: has to do with if the product works well with other software or hardware’s

in my own research.

I found the other three categories of testers:

Manual Testers: to see if the manual matches with the product. It supports

Black Box Testing: this seems to be a version of all the elements presented above, except for the automated testing where you test and stretch the capabilities of the current software to see the meet specs and requirements.

White Box Testing: this is similar to automated testing where it often requires programming in addition to software testing, and you create code to test the stability of the product.

If you have other observations on this topic, please feel free to write your observations in the comment section of this blog.