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 negative testing

Testing changes always come in two parts: was the entity changed correctly, and was everything else left unchanged? That second aspect can sometimes be overlooked, so ensure you include it in your testing. For every positive test case you write, consider the equivalent negative case; here is an example:

  • If one user is deleted, are other users still available?
  • Does a user have the access they should and are they barred from areas they shouldn’t have access to?
  • Is the configuration updated correctly, and are the other configuration options unchanged?

We already saw the catastrophic example of the missed WHERE clause. The positive test for that change passed – the faulty customer did have their conference number updated. The only problem was that all the other numbers in the cloud were changed simultaneously. This is a problem when it’s unclear how widely the configuration is used. A setting might be local to one...