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 static testing

Static testing involves carefully reviewing the code to think through its implications and possible issues. It lets you find bugs before the code is even run by highlighting edge cases that haven’t been handled and good coding practice. If your company already runs code reviews, check that they always consider these cases and testing.

In terms of the review types listed in Chapter 3, How to Run Successful Specification Reviews, this is an inspection, stepping in detail through the code to identify and solve technical problems by domain experts.

Static testing should review the unit tests, which are written alongside the code. Apply the ideas in this book to ensure the unit tests comprehensively verify the individual functions within each feature. The tests can even be written before the code as part of Test Driven Development (TDD). In TDD, the developer writes unit tests based on their proposed implementation, which initially fails. As they write...