There are really two sides to testing Verification and Validation. Unfortunately the meaning of these terms has been defined differently by several governing / regulatory bodies. To put it more succinctly there is testing that can be performed before the product is constructed / built and there are types of testing that can be performed after the product has been constructed / built.

Preventing defects from occurring involves testing before the product is constructed / built. There are several methods for accomplishing this goal. The most powerful and cost effective being Reviews. Reviews can be either formal / technical reviews or peer reviews. Formal product development life cycles will provide the testing team with useful materials / deliverables for the review process. When properly implemented any effective development paradigm should supply these deliverables. For example:

• Cascade
• Requirements
• Functional Specifications
• Agile or Extreme
• High level Requirements
• Storyboards

Testing needs to be involved in this Review process and any defects need to be recorded and managed.

Bucket testing is also called as variable testing or A-B testing. A bucket is a storage unit that contains data. The bucket design goals are: aggregation, intelligence, self-sufficiency, mobility, heterogeneity and archive independence and metadata, as well as the methods for accessing both. Bucket testing methodology is largely used for website testing and not for software testing.

Buckets contain 0 or more packages. Packages contain 0 or more elements. Actual data objects are stored as elements, and elements are grouped together in packages within a bucket. Testing this actual data objects, which are stores as elements and number of elements that are grouped together in packages that are within a bucket is known as bucket testing.

Bucket testing services is a methodology for gauging the impact of different product designs on a Web site's metrics. The basic premise is to run two simultaneous versions of a single or set of Web pages in order to measure the difference in clicks, traffic, transactions, and more between the two. Bucket testing provided a great way to send a small amount of traffic (usually less than 5%) to a different user interface without negatively impacting the bottom line if our new design had unintended negative consequences.

Bucket testing is often known by many other names like split testing and A/ B testing. It is often considered to be a market testing methodology which helps to ensure QA services within organization. The bucket testing methodology is used to compare a variety of baseline control samples with the single variables test samples. This is done for improving the responding rates of the whole mechanisms and consider in independent testing services for websites. It is direct mail strategy classic in nature. It has been employed in the interactive space to make use of features like landing pages, emails and banner ads etc.