Book Image

Software Test Design

By : Simon Amey
Book Image

Software Test Design

By: Simon Amey

Overview of this book

Software Test Design details best practices for testing software applications and writing comprehensive test plans. Written by an expert with over twenty years of experience in the high-tech industry, this guide will provide you with training and practical examples to improve your testing skills. Thorough testing requires a thorough understanding of the functionality under test, informed by exploratory testing and described by a detailed functional specification. This book is divided into three sections, the first of which will describe how best to complete those tasks to start testing from a solid foundation. Armed with the feature specification, functional testing verifies the visible behavior of features by identifying equivalence partitions, boundary values, and other key test conditions. This section explores techniques such as black- and white-box testing, trying error cases, finding security weaknesses, improving the user experience, and how to maintain your product in the long term. The final section describes how best to test the limits of your application. How does it behave under failure conditions and can it recover? What is the maximum load it can sustain? And how does it respond when overloaded? By the end of this book, you will know how to write detailed test plans to improve the quality of your software applications.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Preparing to Test
6
Part 2 – Functional Testing
13
Part 3 – Non-Functional Testing
17
Conclusion
Appendix – Example Feature Specification

Testing localization

Getting a feature to work in a single language is usually a challenge, but usability must also consider working in different languages and geographies. Translation bugs can be critical blockers – recall the example from Chapter 7, Testing of Error Cases, of a hardware unit that couldn’t boot when set to Danish. An error in rendering one of the variables in the string caused a critical issue, and we loaded the strings so early in the boot sequence that we couldn’t even upgrade them. It needed emergency intervention to fix. So, don’t underestimate the importance of translations and testing them well, even though they come with challenges. As with usability testing in general, there are both subjective and objective aspects to testing localization.

Objectively, all strings must have translations in place that render correctly. Remember to include both successful cases and error messages in your testing. When manually testing translations...