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

Prioritizing requirement testing

Describing how to plan and track testing tasks is beyond the scope of this book, but the specification review meeting is an excellent opportunity to prioritize the testing. All parts of the feature specification are not equal; some will be well understood and covered by the developer’s testing and used by product owners, while others will be risky and/or rely solely on the test team. As described previously, the developers can indicate which areas they are most worried about. If it’s possible to disable some parts of the feature, the product owners can tell which areas are the most important to test and release first.

Some areas of the test plan are easy to test, such as customer-facing interfaces. Others are backend systems that may require specialist knowledge or areas that need scripting or test tools to exercise. Those areas that will take the longest to set up should ideally be started first. If you have multiple people working...