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

Completing the specification

To make the specification complete, we need to tour all the different areas of testing once more:

  • Functional tests
  • User experience tests
  • Security tests
  • Error case testing
  • Maintainability
  • Non-functional tests – performance and load requirements

This time, you need to think them through in detail to capture all the product’s behavior. Later chapters describe these more thoroughly, but here, we will examine how they relate to the feature specification, ready to be fleshed out later. First, we will cover the functional requirements that describe the main use cases.

Functional test requirements

The feature specification needs to describe all the feature’s designed behavior, starting with the happy-path cases of the functionality it is supposed to provide. State machines are an excellent way to step through the different points on a user’s journey, tracking the various stages. At each one, list...