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

Raising system limits

Load testing is required for one specific form of feature enhancement: raising application limits. Your product currently supports 50 simultaneous users; if that increased to 100, would it still work? The first test you need to do is load the system up to that level to check for internal limits.

The complexity of these changes is often underestimated because testers perform most of the work rather than developers. Usually, features require more time from developers than testers because designing and implementing a feature takes longer than testing it. That means companies typically have more developers than testers to reflect that difference. However, when raising an internal system limit, the development work may be as easy as changing a single number, from 50 to 100, for instance. On the other hand, the test work may involve developing new tools to reach that higher limit and, once reached, running an extensive test plan.

In a complex system, there can...