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

Testing in the release cycle

You need to choose when you will run these different tests within your release cycle. You can select a subset of your automated tests to run against every product change as part of a CI/CD pipeline, separate from new feature testing. These CI/CD tests are vital checks to avoid bugs and issues from running live, especially if they are set to block the release process. However, these tests have strict requirements:

  • Speed: They must run fast enough that they don’t overly delay releases
  • Reliability: They must work consistently and only fail when there is a real issue
  • Coverage: They must cover all critical aspects of your product

There is a natural trade-off between speed and coverage: the more you test, the slower it goes, so you need to carefully judge the tests to include. These tests also need to be highly reliable, as they are run so often and can delay releases. Unit tests are ideal here as they have fewer dependencies, but...