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

Scheduling the meeting

You should send around the feature specification a few days before the meeting to give everyone a chance to review it and submit comments in advance. If there is a critical misunderstanding – an area of functionality not covered or described incorrectly – it can be flagged up without wasting people’s time in the meeting. It works well to have both a written and spoken review. The reviewers can take their time and think through their comments, and then you can rapidly discuss them and reach decisions.

You may need to have multiple test plan reviews. If you have planned out the feature before it has been implemented, there should be a review before implementation begins. After it has been implemented, there should also be a review to catch any necessary changes. Often, not all functionality will be delivered in the first version, so this is the chance to describe the exact behavior in this version and what will be added in the future.

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