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

Using feedback

Test plans are not static documents carved in stone to stand for all time. They should be dynamic, living texts that evolve as you learn more about your features and products. Recall the testing spiral from Chapter 1, Making the Most of Exploratory Testing. Even after the detailed test plan is complete, you need further testing, specification, and discussion cycles to refine and improve your checks.

Those refinements can take several forms. Most benignly, you may need to add details you are happy with to the specification. Perhaps a particular input case or UI element had been missed from the document. If you find it during testing and it works as intended, all you need to do is write it up.

In my experience, such lucky coincidences are rare. If an element was missed from the specification, it’s unlikely a developer will implement it exactly as the product owner intended. Most feedback is, unfortunately, negative—either bugs where the feature doesn...