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What are the most effective software testing methodologies for modern applications?
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I've been working on a large scale web application and I'm trying to optimize our testing approach. We're currently using a mix of unit testing and some integration tests, but I feel like we're missing something.
What software testing methodologies have you found most effective for complex applications? I'm particularly interested in approaches that handle both frontend and backend testing efficiently. I've heard about behavior driven development and test driven development, but I'm not sure which would be better for our team of 15 developers.
Also, how do you balance automated testing with manual testing? We're spending way too much time on manual regression testing and I think we need to improve our automation strategy.
For complex applications, I've found that a layered approach to software testing methodologies works best. We use unit tests for individual components, integration tests for API interactions, and end-to-end tests for critical user journeys.
The key is to have the right mix. We aim for about 70% unit tests, 20% integration tests, and 10% end-to-end tests. Unit tests are fast and help with programming error detection early, while integration tests catch issues with component interactions.
For balancing automation and manual testing, we automate everything that's repetitive and predictable. Manual testing is reserved for exploratory testing and usability checks. It took us about six months to build up our test automation suite, but now it saves us countless hours.
In our Java projects, we've had good success with test driven development combined with behavior driven development. TDD helps us think about edge cases from the start, while BDD helps ensure we're building what the business actually needs.
One thing that's been crucial for us is contract testing for microservices. When you have multiple services talking to each other, integration tests can be flaky. Contract tests ensure that services adhere to their agreed-upon interfaces.
For your team of 15, I'd recommend starting with TDD for new features and gradually applying it to legacy code during refactoring. It's less disruptive than trying to retrofit tests everywhere at once.
We use a combination of different software testing methodologies depending on the component. For performance-critical code, we do extensive load testing. For security-sensitive parts, we use penetration testing and static analysis.
One methodology that doesn't get enough attention is chaos engineering. We intentionally introduce failures in our staging environment to see how the system responds. It's helped us find weaknesses in our error handling and recovery mechanisms.
Regarding automation vs manual, we've automated about 85% of our regression testing. The remaining 15% is exploratory testing done by QA specialists who look for edge cases we might have missed in our automated tests.
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