Regressions software

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What is regression in software development? So what is a regression? How can you deal with regressions? Various techniques when performing regression testing Retest All involves re-running all test cases in the test suite to check for errors or problems. Like the post? Share it:. Donna Raphael-Rene Project Executive I have a drive and passion for development, project management, social media and music with career backgrounds in those fields.

Rajitha on December 28, at am. When this occurs, the program will continue running at full speed, so the user may not notice the regression at first. In this manifestation, there are certain functions that do not work anymore. For example, if a program can search for files, that function may no longer work. This can affect accessory functions — those not commonly used — or the main function of the program.

Non-functional software regression is more dangerous and easier to notice, even though all functions are still working. In this manifestation, the regression makes the program run slower, or the output of the program will be significantly less. The lack of speed means the program may also become vulnerable to malicious coding and attacks, putting both the program and the computer on which it is running at risk for hacking.

The speed can become so slow that it may be impossible to use the program. In either case, regressions are generally perceived as indicators of some underlying problem, and a high rate of regressions is a legitimate cause for concern.

In other words, the software has gone backward regressed in response to a change, rather than moving forward. The nightmare regression situation is code that has become so fragile that it breaks whenever you make a change. This often happens in legacy systems that were — or have become — tightly-coupled and monolithic.

In fact, this fragility can progress to the point where a system becomes literally unmaintainable. Any change, no matter how small, incurs such a high cost of testing and debugging that further changes become economically unviable.

However, there are other causes for apparent regressions besides a fragile code base, and getting the true cause sorted out early can speed resolution of the issue and avoid mis-diagnosis. Judging by the version numbers, there were no major changes made to the environment, the data, or the test case itself that would have caused a test that had previously passed to suddenly fail.

The only significant change is the build itself. Our first suspicion, therefore, is that this is a coding problem —something is broken that used to work. While analysis is needed to be certain, we have good reason to suspect this to be a literal regression. Figure 1: Example regression tracker click to open in new tab. For cells K10 and L13, we should suspect — absent specific knowledge to the contrary — that a change in the test case itself may have caused the failure.

Both tests had been consistently passing in previous builds, even in multiple environments and data configurations. The only significant change here—in addition to the build—is that the test case version has changed. We should therefore look at changes to the test case as a potential cause for this apparent regression, in addition to looking at the code itself.

Note that the outcome of this analysis can go either way: the new test case might be right, while the old test case that had been passing was wrong.

It is more likely either an issue with the new test, or a long-term bug in the code that was not caught by the old test. The right action — besides fixing it plus any related issues — is to improve the test process so that future bugs of this nature will be caught sooner. In some cases, it might mean versioning the database schema or schemas; in others it might be an identifier for a given test data set.