Regression Process And Technique

What is Regression Testing

Before we discuss Regression Testing we need to first know the meaning of the word regression. Regression in plain words. means errors that occur due to some action or activities in a system. Regression plays a very important role in every field, be it Medical, Finance or IT. In testing terms, Regression is a type of testing that is undertaken to find regression in a system or software, post making any kind of changes in the system.

Importance of Regression Testing:

1. Requirements change and we modify code based on the new requirement
2. Addition of new feature in your project/product
3. Fixing of critical defects
4. Fixing any performance-related issues

Type Of Regression Testing/ Approaches

Regression testing is classified into the below-given type of a broader basis.

1. Corrective Regression Testing: This type of testing is used when there are no changes introduced in the product’s specification. In this already existing test cases are reused.
2. Retest-all Regression Testing: As the name suggests in this type of testing we tend to retest the complete application or software. It is very tedious and requires a lot of man-hours.

The strategy involves the testing of all aspects of a particular product as well as reusing all test cases even where the changes/modifications have not been made.

This type of testing is not at all advisable when there is a small change that has been introduced in the existing product.

3. Selective Regression Testing: It is done to analyze the impact of new code added to the already existing code of the software. In this, a subset from the existing test cases are used to reduce the effort required for retesting and the cost involved.

4)Progressive Regression Testing: This type of regression testing works effectively when there are certain changes done in the program specifications as well as new test cases are designed. Conducting this testing helps in ensuring that there are no features that exist in the previous version that has been compromised in the new and updated version.

5. Complete Regression Testing: Complete regression testing is the best to be used in case multiple changes have been done to the already existing code. Moreover, this type of testing is specifically used when the new change has a certain impact on the root code of the software. Conducting this type of testing is highly beneficial to identify unexpected issues.

Once this testing is completed, the final system can be made available to the user.

6. Partial Regression Testing: Partial regression testing is done to test issues when new codes are added to already existing code. The idea behind partial regression testing to make sure that a system is performing as it is supposed to be after the addition of a new code.
7. Unit Regression Testing: It’s the most important part of unit testing. Mostly conducted in isolation, mainly focused on code units and all the dependencies and interactions will be blocked at the time of the test.

Challenges

1. Regression testing forms an important phase of STLC but brings along several challenges for the testers.
2. Takes a lot of time: it is time-consuming, it requires rerunning a complete set of test cases for a complete or some particular set of code.
3. Complex: Updates make your code more complex, they even increase the set of test cases for regression testing.
4. Communicating Business Value: Regression testing ensures that updates bring no flaws in the existing code. But considering the time taken to complete regression testing, it becomes hard to make non-technical clients understand the value of regression testing.

Benefits of Regression Testing

The basic purpose of regression testing is to identify bugs that might have got developed due to the changes, So there any many benefit of the regression testing:

• The chance of detecting issues is increase after the change of code.
• Maintain the high quality to release the product in the market.
• Highly beneficial in situations when continuous changes are introduced in the product

Tools of Regression Testing

If the software has frequent changes, regression testing costs will escalate. In such cases, manual execution of test cases increases test execution time as well as costs. The automation of regression test cases is the smart choice in such cases. The extent of automation depends on the number of test cases that remain re-usable.

The following are the most important tools used for both functional and regression testing:

• Selenium

• Quick Test Professional (QTP)

Want to learn how to create effective test cases for your registration and login page? Follow this comprehensive guide to get started