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Software Quality Assurance (QA) is the process of ensuring that the software being built has the required levels of quality.
While testing is the most common activity used in QA, there are other complementary techniques such as static analysis, code reviews, and formal verification.
Quality Assurance = Validation + Verification
QA involves checking two aspects:
Whether something belongs under validation or verification is not that important. What is more important is that both are done, instead of limiting to only verification (i.e., remember that the requirements can be wrong too).
Exercises
Statements about validation and verification
Choose the correct statements about validation and verification.
(a)(b)(c)(d)(e)(f)
Explanation:
Whether something belongs under validation or verification is not that important. What is more important is that we do both.
Developer testing is more about finding bugs in the code, rather than bugs in the requirements.
In QA, system testing is more about verification (does the system follow the specification?) and acceptance testing is more about validation (does the system solve the user’s problem?).
A system crash is more likely to be a bug in the code, not in the requirements.
Code review is the systematic examination of code with the intention of finding where the code can be improved.
Reviews can be done in various forms. Some examples below:
Pull Request reviews
In pair programming
Pair programming:
Pair programming is an agile software development technique in which two programmers work together at one workstation. One, the driver, writes code while the other, the observer or navigator, reviews each line of code as it is typed in. The two programmers switch roles frequently. [source: Wikipedia]
A good introduction to pair programming:
Formal inspections
Inspections involve a group of people systematically examining project artifacts to discover defects. Members of the inspection team play various roles during the process, such as:
Advantages of code review over testing:
Disadvantages:
Resources
Static analysis: Static analysis is the analysis of code without actually executing the code.
Static analysis of code can find useful information such as unused variables, unhandled exceptions, style errors, and statistics. Most modern IDEs come with some inbuilt static analysis capabilities. For example, an IDE can highlight unused variables as you type the code into the editor.
The term static in static analysis refers to the fact that the code is analyzed without executing the code. In contrast, dynamic analysis requires the code to be executed to gather additional information about the code e.g., performance characteristics.
Higher-end static analysis tools (static analyzers) can perform more complex analysis such as locating potential bugs, memory leaks, inefficient code structures, etc.
Some example static analyzers for Java: CheckStyle, PMD, FindBugs
Linters are a subset of static analyzers that specifically aim to locate areas where the code can be made 'cleaner'.
Formal verification uses mathematical techniques to prove the correctness of a program.
An introduction to Formal Methods
by Eric Hehner
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Exercises
Absence of errors
Testing cannot prove the absence of errors. It can only prove the presence of errors. However, formal methods can prove the absence of errors.
True
Explanation: While using formal methods is more expensive than testing, it can indeed prove the correctness of a piece of software conclusively, in certain contexts. Getting such proof via testing requires exhaustive testing, which is not practical to do in most cases.