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

Backup and restore testing

A crucial part of destructive testing is ensuring your backups can restore your system correctly. Your backups are worthless until they’ve been tried in practice. This is a significant operation and highly disruptive, so as with all destructive testing, you’ll need a dedicated test environment for it. The following is a checklist of tests to run around backup and restore:

  • Is the system fully functional during backups?
  • Are there different types of backups you can restore from?
    • Partial or full backups
    • Different database systems
    • Streaming replication versus from one point in time
  • How long do backup and restore operations take?
  • Is there a warning if taking a backup is disrupted?
  • Ensure you can restore from all backup types
  • When restoring from a backup, is everything replaced?
  • Are any manual steps required when restoring from a backup?

Taking a backup can be a disruptive operation in itself since it involves database...