Final Testing

Final testing, also called terminal testing, happens at the end of production, once every part of the program has been written. The whole program is run and tested together rather than one module at a time.

What final testing checks

• That each part of the program passes the right data to the parts it works with, so the modules fit together.
• That the finished program produces the output its requirements asked for.
• That the program works when a real user moves from one part to another, for example entering an order and then seeing the total and the receipt.

Imagine a ten-pin bowling program built from three modules: one records each player's score, one works out the team average, and one displays the leaderboard. The score module passed its own test because it displayed each score correctly, but it stored the score as text. In final testing you play a whole game through the program and spot that the average module joins "12" and "18" into "1218" instead of adding them. The fault only appears when the modules are joined.

How it differs from iterative testing

Both are needed. A module can pass every test on its own and still fail when it is joined to another module, because the two may expect different data or the wrong value may be passed between them. Final testing is the only stage that runs the complete program from start to finish, so it is the only stage that can show the program works as one piece.