Compliance Testing: Why Does Your App Needs It?

Performing functional testing on your software products must be a routine habit for you, but do you give equal importance to non-functional testing too? Many times we overlook the non-functional testing, keeping on stake the long-term performance and success of your product. Keeping in mind the long-term goals and success, ensure to carry out a round of non-functional testing. One of the most important non-functional testing that needs your attention is compliance testing.

What is Compliance Testing?

Compliance testing evaluates and assesses whether your software fulfills all the regulations, standards, requirements of specifications, etc. that it has to stand true on.

Compliance testing can be considered more as an auditing task to ensure that it fulfills required standards. It is many times also referred to as conformance testing.

Attributes compliance testing tests for

The deviation in the specified standards can affect various attributes of your software. You can assess the following attributes of your software through compliance testing.

Robustness
Performance
Interoperability
Functions
Behavior of system

Importance of Compliance Testing

Before moving ahead we should first know why is compliance testing important and why do we need it? Here are a few points that will help you understand its utility.

To validate if your software fulfills all the system requirements and standards.
To assess if all the related documentation is complete and correct.
To validate the software design, development, and evaluation is carried out as per specifications, standards, norms, and guidelines.
To validate if system maintenance is determined as per specified standards and recommended approach.
To assure that your software is free from any sort of complaints from regulatory bodies.

Who executes Compliance testing?

Most of the companies do not perform compliance testing. They do not consider it mandatory. However, executing compliance testing largely depends on the management. If they consider a need to execute compliance testing, they hire or ask the in-house team to conduct compliance testing.

Many organizations also deploy a panel of experts or a regulatory body to assess and validate various regulations, specifications, policies, and guidelines.

What to test in Compliance testing?

Compliance testing is initiated by the management taking care of the complete understanding of the team about various regulations, specifications, guidelines, etc.

To assure the best results and quality assurance, all the regulations and standards should be clearly mentioned to the team to avoid any ambiguities.

Requirement objectives
Scope of requirements
Standards that rules the implementation
Call of the software to be developed

When to perform Compliance Testing?

When you need to assess the reliability, comprehensiveness, and accuracy of your software with respect to requirement specifications, you can carry out compliance testing.

How to perform compliance testing?

Compliance testing is more like an audit and follows no specific testing methodology.

You can simply carry it out like other general testing methods. Here is an overview of generic compliance testing methodology that may help you in performing it.

The first step is to collect precise details about all specified standards, norms, regulations and other relevant criteria.
In the next step, you are required to documents all the norms and standards clearly and precisely.
In the third step, you will have to keenly assess all the development phases against the documented standards and norms to identify and detect any deviations or flaws in the implemented process.
Next step includes creating a report and reporting all the flaws to the concerned team.
Lastly, you are required to re-verify and validate the affected areas post-fixation to ensure conformance of the required standards.
If required certification is provided to the system for the compliance of required norms and standards.

Many tools are also available to carry out compliance testing. These tools can simplify your task saving on to a lot of time and efforts.

Based upon the required standards and your system type there are many compliance testing tools that are available in the market.

Here are the names of few commonly used compliance testing tools.

EtherCAT conformance testing tool
MAP2.1 conformance testing tool
Software Licence Agreement OMS Conformance Tester 4.0
CANopen Conformance test tool

Advantages of Compliance Testing

Compliance testing is though not a mandatory part of STLC, but it is advisable to carry around to assure better performance and compliance of your software.

Listed below are a few points that might help you to better understand the advantages of carrying out compliance testing.

It assures proper implementation of required specifications
It validates portability and interoperability
It validates whether the required standards and norms are properly adhered to
Validate that the interfaces and functions are working as expected
Can help you identify the areas that are to be confirmed with those which are not to be confirmed such as syntax and semantics

Disadvantages of Compliance Testing

Compliance testing is no easy task and might become very challenging for the testers. Here are some challenges that you might incur while doing compliance testing

To get the best results, you need to identify the class of the system and then the testing has to be carried out based on the class following a suitable methodology
You will have to specific specifications into Profiles, Levels, and Modules
You will need to have complete know-how of different standards, norms and regulations of the system to be tested.

Conclusion:

Delivering glitch free software enhances your customers trust upon you. Compliance testing is another step that assures that your system is free from any flaws and glitches.