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

Graceful degradation

Mainly, stress testing involves taking already present functions and using them excessively, but there is one aspect with dedicated code: graceful degradation. For functions that you expect to be overloaded but you still want to provide some service, your system can detect that state and adjust.

Possibly that doesn’t apply to your system, in which case you can skip this section. However, keep it in mind for specification reviews: if you don’t deliberately handle the case of overload, what do you want to do? Sometimes you can police a limit and prevent additional load by rejecting excess requests. In other situations, you have more subtle options.

Real-world example – Counting the frames

In a video conferencing company I worked for, we implemented graceful degradation in case the load on our system got too high. Our first line of defense was the best: if we couldn’t handle the video processing load, we would leave everyone connected...