Maintenance Testing

Maintenance Testing is all about preserving the quality we have already achieved. Once the system is operational, then any further enhancements or fault fixes will be part of the on-going maintenance of that system — the testing done for these changes to an existing working system is maintenance testing.

Because the system is already there, when something is changed, there is a lot of the system that should still work, so maintenance testing involves a lot of regression testing as well as the testing of the changes.
It is worth noting that there is a different sequence with Maintenance Testing. In development we start from small components and work up to the full system; in maintenance testing, we can start from the top with the whole system. This means that we can make sure that there is no effect on the whole system before testing the individual fix. We also have different data - there is live data available in maintenance testing, whereas in development testing we had to build the test data.

Poor or missing specifications
It is often argued that Maintenance Testing is the hardest type of testing to do because:
•there are no specifications;
•any documentation is out-of-date;
•lack of regression test scripts;
•knowledge base is limited due to age of the system (and programmers!).

Well I hope you enjoyed this basic information for beginners to this topic.

-V.Vadivelan.