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

Performance testing

Is your application slower than the last release? Some services, such as web servers, have relatively low resource requirements and are unlikely to be constrained under normal circumstances. Other applications will hit the limits of the available network, disk access, memory, or processing. You will see symptoms such as increased latency on operations or rising failure rates, which indicate that your system cannot maintain this level of activity.

Programs tend to become larger and more complex over time, which always carries the risk of slowing them down. Whatever limits your system is hitting, part of testing is to ensure that this release doesn’t accidentally have lower performance than the last.

Real-world example – The accidental load test

In a company that provided SMS text message infrastructure, I was onsite to perform user acceptance testing with a large customer. We worked through the test plan, successfully demonstrating all the...