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 time zones

Since almost all applications report time in some way, nearly all applications will need to handle different time zones. Even if your customers are clustered in a long thin stripe along the Greenwich Meridian, daylight savings time and leap seconds can still cause issues. Here are the considerations when adding them to your test plan.

Let’s examine the case of creating a conference since that demonstrates all the issues you are likely to come across. In that case, there are six time zones to consider:

  • The initial time zone of the conference creator
  • The initial time zone of the conference invitee
  • The conference creator moving to a different time zone
  • The conference invitee moving to a different time zone
  • The initial time zone of the conference
  • The updated time zone of the conference

In each case, you need to ensure that people seeing the conference both from within the time zone and outside it can see the conference reported...