4 Main Inequalities of Testing and Debugging Procedures

4 Main Inequalities of Testing and Debugging Procedures
August 17 08:56 2015 Print This Article

Quite often during interviews in the software testing company applicants are asked about the difference between testing and debugging. Most often, beginners admit the typical mistake by claiming that these two concepts denote the same thing.

However, anyone wishing to work in the software product testing field is required to understand that testing and debugging are different as night and day. In a nutshell, debugging is the work for programmers and developers who perform this procedure before the product gets into the hands of a testing team.

Testers, in turn, perform functional testing, installation testing, configuration testing, and so on, trying to find errors missed by the developers in order to send reports on these errors for further correction.

Main Signs of the Difference Between Testing and Debugging:

  1. Testing must often be a pre-thought-out, carefully planned process (of course, except such types of the check as ad hoc testing) while debugging is characterized by better efficiency under intuitive and experimental conditions.
  2. Testing does not require understanding the internal structure of the program in detail – debugging is only possible with a thorough knowledge of the “innards” of the system.
  3. The testing process can often be automated – if not completely, then at least in part, but the debugging process does not foresee the automation.
  4. The main task of debugging is to discover the cause of the bug, and the main task of testing is just the detection of an error and sending it to the developers for determination of its cause and fixing.
  5. Testing always starts with known conditions and debugging starts from possibly un-known initial conditions.

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Nataliia Vasylyna
Nataliia Vasylyna

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2 Comments

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  1. Orel Green
    April 05, 09:12 #1 Orel Green

    Testing: Basically, testing is a process of exploring the system to find defects present in the software, and not only that, this process has to locate the defects and define what will happen once these defects occur. This process is performed in the testing phase by testing team, and after this phase, they will report to the developer team to debug.
    Some popular testing tools: Selenium, Katalon Studio, TestComplete,…

    Debugging: Once Development team received the report from the testing team, they will start debugging. The purpose of this phase is to locate the bug and rids the software of it. It is a one-off process and is done manually. In this process, a special tool called debugger is used in locating the bugs, most of the programming environments have the debugger.
    Some popular Debugger tools: WinDbg, OllyDbg, IDA Pro,…

    Reply to this comment
    • QATestLab
      April 05, 10:04 QATestLab

      Orel thank for your comment.

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