What is the difference between conventional and unconventional testing?

Conventional testing and unconventional testing are a less heard testing methodology. Before we discuss about these two methods, let's discuss about the “quality management system” or QMS as it is called in its short form.

QUALITY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
- Quality management system can be thought of as an organizational structure which states and manages the processes, procedures and resources to be implemented for better quality management.
- Earlier random sampling and simple statistics were used for predicting the output of a test in production line.
- But eventually by the end of the 19th century the entering the data manually for these test cases was considered to be a costly method.
- Later in the 21st century the quality management system succeeded in overcoming this problem.
- It came with a new transparent and sustainable technology which gradually achieved a wide customer satisfaction.

CONVENTIONAL AND UNCONVENTIONAL TESTING
- Conventional testing is nothing but a similar initiative of quality management system.
- Conventional testing is entirely based up on the standards and conventions of the testing as defined by the quality management system.
- It is a way of maintaining the testing standards.
- Since the conventional testing is guided by some conventions, hence it was named so.
- Unconventional testing, we can say just by looking at the name that it doesn’t follow any conventions.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL & UNCONVENTIONAL TESTING

DIFFERENCE #1:
- In conventional testing, only features and functionality of a software system or application are tested by the engineer in charge of the testing cycle.
- In unconventional testing, only the documentation is verified on the basis of the quality assurance principles.

DIFFERENCE #2:
- In unconventional testing, the documentation is tested from the starting phase of SDLC (systems development life cycle) by the testers of quality assurance.
- Conventional testing comes into play only during the testing phase of the systems development life cycle.

DIFFERENCE #3:
- In conventional testing, the developed components of the application are checked by the tester for whether they are working according to the expectations of the consumers or not.
- A typical unconventional testing starts from the coding phase of the systems development life cycle.

DIFFERENCE #4:
- Unconventional testing keeps a track of the whole software development process on the basis of the quality assurance principles i.e. whether or not the software has been developed according to the guidelines and specifications provided by the client company.
- The conventional testing is focused more up on the functionality of the software system or application.

USES & LIMITATIONS OF CONVENTIONAL TESTING
- Conventional testing is being used in migration projects these days.
- It sometimes happens that the testers performing the conventional testing have a very little knowledge about that particular application software which they are testing. In that the comparison testing is employed.
- This is preferred because here it is not required that the tester should know what will be the outcome.
- This problem can be solved also if the development team has already prepared the test scripts for the tester.
- Conventional testing is a bit expensive as it requires a lot of time to test, verify and validate each and every test script.
- There will be a certain number of errors in a program that is of course obvious and depends up on the degree of complexity of the program
- Errors also depend on the kind of migration process being followed in the project.
- The aspects of the software system or application failing these tests have to be corrected and retested accordingly.