Difference Between Testing and Debugging Explained Simply?

If you are into software development, or you are just a curious person who wants to know how apps develop or work, you must have heard about the terms testing and debugging! These terms confuse a lot but are actually a lot different from each other.

Testing is about finding errors in any software, or an app and debugging is all about fixing those errors.

Here are some statistics that show how important both of these processes are:

The global software testing market is growing rapidly at a rate of 5% and probably it will reach USD 109.5 billion by 2027. This growth is just from 2023 to 2027 and that’s huge.

On the other hand, the global software debugging market was around $2.5 billion in 2024. It is expected to reach roughly between USD 7.2 billion to USD 7.8 billion by 2032-2033. It’s growing at CAGR of 8.5-12.2%.

Now let’s debug your confusion and understand the difference between testing and debugging.

What is Testing?

Testing or software testing is the process of checking a system developed or in developing phase and finding if it meets the required specifications or it is bug-free or not.

Software are generally developed for clients or sometimes for in-house project. So, before making it live or delivering it to the client, testing uncover any defects in the software.

Apart from just finding out the bugs, testing is also about ensuring quality, reliability and performance of the applications. It is performed under different conditions and scenarios so that the application works well no matter what the situation is.

Did you know that large enterprises allocate around 40% of their total software development budget to testing alone?

That’s so because correct working of a software depends on testing more than any other step!

How Testing is Performed?

Software testing involves seven steps and is majorly done using testing tools. Below is the whole process explained:

• Requirement Analysis: The first step is to understand what you need to test before you even touch the code. This step ensures that you do not miss anything important.
• Test Planning: Once you are aware about what needs to be tested, then enters planning part. This includes deciding the scope, resources, timeline, and which testing methods or tools you are going to use.
• Test Case Design: Here, you create specific scenarios that your software should pass. It’s just like a checklist that tells you, “If this happens, the software should respond this way.”
• Test Environment Setup: Setting up the right hardware, software, and network environment ensures your tests give accurate results, just like real users would experience.
• Test Execution: Now the fun begins! You actually run the tests. This step shows you where the software fails or behaves unexpectedly, helping you spot bugs early.
• Defect Reporting: So, once testers find all the bugs, reporting it is important. Proper screenshots, or logs helps developers fix the errors/bugs faster.
• Fun Fact: These long bugs report sometimes lead to fight between developers and testers!
• Test Closure: After all testing is done, you wrap things up by documenting the results, lessons learned, and whether the software is ready for release.

Types of Testing

• Manual Testing vs Automation Testing: Manual testing is when testers check the software manually, step by step. This type of testing involves the use of tools but not the automation tools. However, automation testing uses tools to run repetitive tests faster. Automation testing saves time when compared to manual testing.
• Functional Testing: This type of testing is to check the functionality of your software. It’s further divided into:
• Unit Testing: Checking small code units
• Integration Testing: Checking how units work together
• System Testing: Testing the whole system
• Acceptance Testing: ensuring it meets business requirements
• Non-Functional Testing: This type of testing is about checking other aspects than the functionality of the software. It includes checking things like performance, security and usability.
• Regression Testing: This is the most important part of testing. Whenever the developers fix any feature or add a new feature, regression testing is to check that the change has not affected the existing features.
• Smoke and Sanity Testing: Smoke testing checks if the basic functions work, while sanity testing makes sure that small changes or fixes didn’t create new problems.

What is Debugging?

Debugging is one of the steps in software development life cycle that involves developers to analyze and fix the root cause of defects found in the software or application.

When compared to testing, it helps in correcting bugs found during the testing phase.

The main purpose of debugging is to make the software behave exactly as intended. This further helps in better user experience and system performance.

In short, you can say debugging as the repair phase of software development.

How Debugging is Performed?

• Identify the Bug: The first step involves finding the problem. The problem is already reported in the testing results. You can also find out bugs in user feedback, or even system crashes.
• Analyze the Cause: Once developers have number of bugs with them, they need to analyze them more deeply to find out why it happened. This means looking at the code logic, inputs, and conditions that could be triggering the issue.
• Locate the Defective Code: After figuring out the cause, developers now have to find the exact step in the code where the problem resides. There are many debugging software like logs, stack traces, and debuggers help you find the error spot.
• Fix the Bug: This step includes fixing the found error in the code. Most importantly, the fix should be in such a way that it does not affect other parts of the program.
• Test the Fix: After the code is fixed, it has to be re-test as per the testing process explained above.
• Document the Fix: The fix needs to be document for records. This report is to avoid these similar bugs in the future.

Types of Debugging

• Interactive Debugging: This type of debugging pauses the program at specific points using IDEs and breakpoints. Developers can inspect variables, check the code line by line, and know what is actually occurring during execution.
• Print Statement Debugging: This is one of the easiest methods of debugging, you add print or log statements in your code. It is simple, assists in maintaining a program flow and is indeed helpful in times when other tools are not available.
• Remote Debugging: Sometimes the code you are debugging is running on a different machine or a different server. With remote debugging, you connect to that environment, check the program, and fix bugs without being on the local system.
• Automated Debugging: These include tools that have static analyzers, memory checkers, and profilers that helps in detecting issues automatically. Developers can save plenty of time by automatically detecting problems that might are hard to find manually.

Final Thoughts

So, the main difference between testing and debugging is that testing identifies the problem and debugging corrects it. Testing is a safety net for developers that helps finding issues before they reach to the users so that they can fix it.

Debugging is fixing these issues with proper tools or also manually. Both are equally important in the software development process, and skipping any of them could lead to a buggy and unreliable software.

Good testing can make good debugging, and good debugging can make sure your testing is really worth the effort!

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