Software verification is a broad and complex discipline of software engineering. The goal of software verification is to assure that a software fully satisfies all requirements expressed by a customer.
There are two main types of verification:
Dynamic verification (Test)
Dynamic verification is performed during the execution of a software, and dynamically checks its behaviour; it is commonly known as Test phase. Depending on the scope of tests, we can categorize them in three families:
- Test in the small: a test that check a single funtion or class (Unit test)
- Test in the large: a test that check a group of classes, such as
- Module test (a single module)
- Integration test (more than one module)
- System test (the entire system)
- Acceptance test: a formal test defined to check acceptance criteria for a software
- Functional test
- Non functional test (performance, stress test)
Static verification (Analysis)
Static verification is a process to check some requirements of a software doing a physical inspection of it. For example:
- Code convention verification
- Bad practices detection
- Metrics calculation
- Formal verification