ABSTRACT
The lowest portion of the software is a unit. This is where the testing should start and is often performed by the software developer. This testing of units occurs before the build of the various components that make up a revision of software. A typical software build test will exercise only the functions and subroutines that have been changed in one build—testing the rest of the code occurs during regression testing. A well-designed suite of regression tests will usually be automated whenever possible. The test engineer executes a “once-over” that the regression tests provide and then reports the results. The merging of hardware and software leads to the integration test followed by the system test. Sometimes live testing includes only hardware-in-the-loop testing; at other times, the software and the product in which it resides will be installed on the final product. Prototypes have the benefit of being testable in much the same way as the real product would be tested.
