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

Soak testing

What if someone decides to play your game for 24 hours straight, host a meeting that long, or leave an operation running for weeks at a time? The next type of stress you can apply to your system is to perform valid and invalid actions over extended periods beyond their design limitations. Some of these limits will be policed with checks to ensure nothing takes longer than a specified time, while others will be open-ended. Some actions will change your system’s state, and others are individual operations you can apply repeatedly. That gives a matrix of possible cases, with examples here:

Policed operation

Unpoliced operation

Valid operations

Ongoing state

Game length

Call length

Processing time

Web session length

Separate operations...