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

API testing

As described in Chapter 5, Black-Box Functional Testing, when APIs are released publicly, they can be tested using black-box techniques. There, you are checking publicly documented messages without knowing how the system implements message handling. APIs can also be semi-public, with some documented commands and others only available for internal use, or they can be purely internal.

The considerations that apply when testing those APIs also apply to messages between components within a system. The approach to testing them is simple enough: their documentation is their specification. There should be internal documents describing the implementation of internal protocols, just as there are for public interfaces, and you can design your tests against those. If that documentation doesn’t exist, your first task is to ensure it’s written.

Armed with that information, you need to systematically step through every field of every message to ensure it is correctly...