Development testing
Development testing is a software development process that involves synchronized application of a broad spectrum of defect prevention and detection strategies in order to reduce software development risks, time, and costs.
Depending on the organization's expectations for software development, development testing might include static code analysis, data flow analysis, metrics analysis, peer code reviews, unit testing, code coverage analysis, traceability, and other software verification practices.
Overview
Development testing is performed by the software developer or engineer during the construction phase of the software development lifecycle.Rather than replace traditional QA focuses, it augments it. Development testing aims to eliminate construction errors before code is promoted to QA; this strategy is intended to increase the quality of the resulting software as well as the efficiency of the overall development and QA process.
Purposes and benefits
Development testing is applied for the following main purposes:- Quality assurance—To improve the overall development and test process by building quality and security into the software.
- Industry or Regulatory Compliance—To achieve compliance with industry or regulatory compliance initiatives that commonly require strict risk reduction as well as bidirectional requirements traceability
Key principles
In each of the above applications, development testing starts by defining policies that express the organization's expectations for reliability, security, performance, and regulatory compliance. Then, after the team is trained on these policies, development testing practices are implemented to align software development activities with these policies. These development testing practices include:- Practices that prevent as many defects as possible through a Deming-inspired approach that promotes reducing the opportunity for error via root cause analysis.
- Practices that expose defects immediately after they are introduced—when finding and fixing defects is fastest, easiest, and cheapest.
Static analysis
The term "development testing" has occasionally been used to describe the application of static analysis tools. Numerous industry leaders have taken issue with this conflation because static analysis is not technically testing; even static analysis that "covers" every line of code is incapable of validating that the code does what it is supposed to do—or of exposing certain types of defects or security vulnerabilities that manifest themselves only as software is dynamically executed.Although many warn that static analysis alone should not be considered a silver bullet or panacea, most industry experts agree that static analysis is a proven method for eliminating many security, reliability, and performance defects. In other words, while static analysis is not the same as development testing, it is commonly considered a component of development testing.