ACTIVITIES OF A SOFTWARE TEST ENGINEER

A test engineer is an information technology (IT) professional who is in charge of one or more technical test activities, including designing test inputs, producing test case values, running test scripts, analyzing results, and reporting results to developers and managers. Although we cast the description in terms of test engineers, every engineer involved in software development should realize that he or she sometimes wears the hat of a test engineer. The reason is that each software artifact
produced over the course of a product’s development has, or should have, an associated set of test cases, and the person best positioned to define these test cases is often the designer of the artifact. A test manager is in charge of one or more test engineers. Test managers set test policies and processes, interact with other managers on the project, and otherwise help the engineers do their work.
Below figure shows some of the major activities of test engineers. A test engineer must design tests by creating test requirements.

These requirements are then transformed into actual values and scripts that are ready for execution. These executable tests are run against the software, denoted P in the figure, and the results are evaluated to determine if the tests reveal a fault in the software.
These activities may be carried out by one person or by several, and the process is monitored by a test manager. One of a test engineer’s most powerful tools is a formal coverage criterion. Formal coverage criteria give test engineers ways to decide what test inputs to use during testing, making it more likely that the tester will find problems in the program and providing greater assurance that the software is of high quality and reliability. Coverage criteria also provide stopping rules for the test engineers. The technical core of this book presents the coverage criteria that are available, describes how they are supported by tools (commercial and otherwise), explains how they can best be applied, and suggests how they can be integrated into the overall development process. Software testing activities have long been categorized into levels, and two kinds of levels have traditionally been used. The most often used level categorization is based on traditional software process steps. Although most types of tests can only be run after some part of the software is implemented, tests can be designed and constructed during all software development steps. The most time-consuming parts of testing are actually the test design and construction, so test activities can and should be carried out throughout development. The second-level categorization is based on the attitude and thinking of the testers.

Activity of Software Test Engineer