Difference between Testing and Debugging

Often, in interviews for software testing, candidates are asked to explain the difference between Software Testing and Debugging. For a layman, they may seem to be the same but they are as different as chalk and cheese.

Testing activity is carried down by a team of testers, in order to find the defect in the software. Test engineers run their tests on the piece of software and if they encounter any defect (i.e. actual results don't match expected results), they report it to the development team. Along with the nature of defect, testers also have to report at what point the defect occurred and what happened due the occurrence of that defect. All this information will be used by development team to DEBUG the defect. (Read more about Defect Life Cycle)

testing and debugging, difference in testing and debugging in software testing interview wikipedia
Testing V/s Debugging

Debugging is the activity which is carried out by the development team (or developer), after getting the test report from the testing team about defect(s) (you may note defects can also be reports by the client). The developer then tries to find the cause of the defect, in this quest he may need to go through lines of code and find which part of code in causing that defect. After finding out the bug, he tries to modify that portion of code and then he rechecks if the defect has been finally removed. After fixing the bug, developers send the software back to testers.

Hope now you are clear on how debugging is different from testing.

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Read More:
Exhaustive Testing: What is exhaustive testing?
Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Testing Activity
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Characteristics of a Good Software
What is Unit testing in Software testing? And its types

10 comments:

  1. I think that both of these things are the same, but apparently is different. Thank you for telling me

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  2. thanks a lot!!!hope the interviewer asks me this one!!

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  3. It's a very basic question for everywhere field like viva-voice , Interview etc.. THANK TO TEAM FOR ANSWERING.

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  4. its good to know the difference between debugging and testing thank
    to the team

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  5. Good explanation in simple terms. Much appreciated.

    ReplyDelete
  6. this is very good answer ,thank you

    ReplyDelete
  7. Really Meaningfull answer. Thank u

    ReplyDelete
  8. thank you that was helpful.

    ReplyDelete