Tuesday 31 March 2015

What is Positive & Negative Testing in Software Testing?

In order to build a successful career in software testing, gaining knowledge of every concept is important. Whether manual testing or selenium, every piece of understanding in every testing tool or type greatly help in getting overall success in the career by refining the skills. For this, a large number of software testing learning packages are available including manual and selenium training in Noida for getting complete education of testing. Institutes like QACampus are dealing in providing training in testing for helping students to achieve their career goal. As software testing is a wide and comprehensive concept, there are many terms that are required to undertstand for getting things done in an appropriate manner. Software testing is basically a process of verification and validation for checking up whether an application under test is working as expected. This testing activity is mainly performed to carried out for finding any errors or defects in software system and thus improving the quality of it. Through this post, I would be putting some light on what is positive and negative testing!


What is Positive Testing?

Positive testing involves a testing process through which the system is validated against the valid input data. In this kind of testing, a tester is always go through the checking procedure for not only validating the set of values, but it is also checked if an application behaves as expected with its expected inputs. The main purpose of doing this testing is to check whether software is not showing error when not supposed to and vice-versa. It is always carried out keeping the positive view and only execute the positive scenario. Hence, the positive testing is always tried to prove the given software or project that it always meets the specifications and requirements as well. Now let's take a look on some positive test scenarios:
  • Password textbox should accept six chars
  • Password textbox should upto twenty chars
  • Password textbox should accept any value in between six and twenty chars length
  • Password textbox should accept all numeric as well as alphabets values
What is Negative Testing?

As far as negative testing is concerned, it is performed where the software is validated against the invalid input data. The process involved in doing the testing activities basically check whether an application behaves as projected with its negative inputs. The main purpose of this kind of testing is to check whether an application not showing error when supposed to and vice-versa. Hence, the process of this kind of testing is to be carried out keeping the negative point of view and only execute the test cases for only invalid set of input data.

The negative testing is performed to detect the inputs where an application is not made or un-handled inputs by providing different invalid. So, the main reason to perform this kind of testing is to check the stability of an application program against the influences of different variety of not-correct validation set of data. Here are few negative test scenarios:
  • Password textbox should not accept less than six chars
  • Password textbox should not exceeds more than twenty chars
  • Password textbox should not accept special chars
You should keep in mind that both positive and negative testing is equally important for performing an effective testing process that helps to enhance the quality of an application. It helps to find more defects and boost the quality of an application under test but it should be performed once the positive testing is complete. As a career building, software testing is a good option if it is learned properly with getting full knowledge of its concepts and tools.