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

Identifying load operations

A massive surge in traffic might be a good problem, but when someone famous retweets your brand or your latest advert goes viral, that may be what you face. How will your system perform? That could be your one chance to make a first impression on thousands of potential customers, so you want it to be a good one.

What are the key operations of your system? These are functions your application runs repeatedly and that might cause a burst of load. Users signing up, logging in, and logging out are three common examples. If administrators can manage other users, then the creation and deletion of accounts are two others. Otherwise, your load testing will depend on your business: the number of simultaneous games you can run on your servers or video calls, the data you can gather, the processing you can perform, the downloads you can sustain, and the page impressions you can render. The possibilities are many and varied.

Go back to your core use cases and...