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

What to check when stress testing

As with load testing, you need to constantly check your system during stress tests. First, carefully review your monitoring as described in Chapter 10, Maintainability. Track any errors or alarms generated during your tests and errors in the logs. That should be a given during any testing but is especially true here.

Stress testing is an external pressure you put on your service – an expected problem. As such, even stress testing shouldn’t show any errors. In my experience, that won’t be the case, so one of your first tasks will be to raise those alerts with the development team to either fix or downgrade to a warning.

Recall the list of system metrics from Chapter 12, Load Testing. All those measures are also important when running stress tests:

  • CPU:
    • High sustained levels
    • Spikes of usage
  • Disk:
    • High usage
    • High rates of increase
  • Memory:
    • High usage
    • High rates of increase
  • System resources:
    • Handles
    • Addresses
    • Database...