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

Debugging load test issues

Functional testing, as described previously, is like taking a scalpel to your application and carefully probing individual functions. Ideally, each tester has a dedicated system, or at least of the core elements, so that you can completely control what happens there. When there is an issue, the logs are silent except for the single operation you performed, aside from any regular background processing. It’s easy to isolate useful information.

When load testing, that’s not the case. Having created a million users, finding the one that failed can be challenging. Performing even a single operation can have a cascade of effects across your system. Creating a single user might involve loading an interface, accepting input, sending that to the backend, and writing it to storage. There may be many other impacts, depending on your system’s architecture.

To debug issues successfully during load testing, you must be thoroughly proficient at...