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

Advantages and disadvantages of destructive testing

Destructive tests cover a range of conditions that other areas of testing don’t touch. There is a class of bugs that you can only find with these tests, so make sure you include them in your test plan. The following table describes the advantages and disadvantages of destructive testing:

Advantages

Disadvantages

The only way to detect this class of issue

Tests rare cases

Verifies your resilience and recovery plans

Requires specialist environments, tools, and tests

Need to filter valid failures from invalid ones

Table 11.1 – Advantages and disadvantages of destructive testing

After completing destructive testing, you will have much greater confidence in the resilience of your...