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

Performing CRUD testing

The four fundamental data operations of stateful computing systems are as follows:

  1. Create
  2. Read
  3. Update
  4. Delete

These apply to any system with data storage, whether in a document or relational databases, text or binary files, or some other method. In all those cases, it is possible to create new records or write new data and then read it back for display or processing. You can update information that has already been written and, finally, delete it. Those operations apply to many systems, so you can use them to guide your testing.

The relative frequencies of those operations will depend on your system. Typical systems, however, will perform reads most of all, followed by updates, creations, and deletions. An HR database, for instance, will list users any time someone looks at the users page. A staff member might have their details updated occasionally after their creation, and while there are a positive number of user entries, creations...