M

Maintainability: The ease with which the system/software can be modified to correct faults, modified to meet new requirements, modified to make future maintenance easier, or adapted to a changed environment.

Maintenance Requirements: A specification of the required maintenance needed for the system/software. The released software often needs to be revised and/or upgraded throughout its lifecycle. Therefore it is essential that the software can be easily maintained, and any errors found during re-work and upgrading.

Within traditional software testing techniques, script maintenance is often a problem as it can be very complicated and time consuming to ensure correct maintenance of the software as the scripts these tools use need updating every time the application under test changes. See Code Free Testing and Self Healing Scripts.

Manual Testing: the oldest type of software testing. Manual testing requires a tester to perform manual test operations on the test software without the help of test automation. Manual testing is a laborious activity that requires the tester to possess a certain set of qualities; to be patient, observant, speculative, creative, innovative, open-minded, resourceful, un-opinionated, and skillful.

As a tester, it is always advisable to use manual white box testing and black-box testing techniques on the test software. Manual testing helps discover and record any software Bugs or discrepancies related to the functionality of the product.

Manual testing can be augmented by Test Automation. It is possible to record and playback manual steps and write automated test script(s) using test automation tools. Although, test automation tools will only help execute test scripts written primarily for executing a particular specification and functionality. Test automation tools lack the ability of decision-making and recording any unscripted discrepancies during program execution. It is recommended that one should perform manual testing of the entire product at least a couple of times before actually deciding to automate the ore mundane activities of the product.

Manual testing helps discover defects related to the usability testing and GUI testing area. While performing manual tests the software application can be validated whether it meets the various standards defined for effective and efficient usage and accessibility. For example, the standard location of the OK button on a screen is on the left and of CANCEL button on the right. During manual testing you might discover that one some screen, it is not. This is a new defect related tot he usability of the screen. In addition, there could be many cases where the GUI is not displayed correctly and the basic functionality of the program is correct. Such bugs are not detectable using test automation tools.

 Repetitive manual testing can be difficult to perform on large software applications or applications having very large dataset coverage. This drawback is compensated for by using manual black-box testing techniques including equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis. Using which, the vast dataset specifications can be divided and converted into a more manageable and achievable set of test suites.

There is no complete substitute for manual testing. Manual testing is crucial for testing software applications more thoroughly. See TestDrive-Assist.

Metric: A standard of measurement. Software metrics are the statistics describing the structure or content of a program. A metric should be a real objective measurement of something such as number of bugs per lines of code.

Modified Condition/Decision Coverage: The percentage of all branch condition outcomes that independently affect a decision outcome that have been exercised by a test case suite.

Modified Condition/Decision Testing: A test case design technique in which test cases are designed to execute branch condition outcomes that independently affect a decision outcome.

Monkey Testing: Testing a system or an application on the fly, i.e. a unit test with no specific end result in mind.

Multiple Condition Coverage: See Branch Condition Combination Coverage.

Mutation Analysis: A method to determine test case suite thoroughness by measuring the extent to which a test case suite can discriminate the program from slight variants (mutants) of the program. See also Error Seeding.

Mutation Testing: Testing done on the application where bugs are purposely added to it. See Bebugging.