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

Summary

In this chapter, you have learned about the importance of white-box testing and the strengths it brings to a test plan.

Code analysis and static testing let you find bugs before you run the application by analyzing the code itself. Unit tests can provide comprehensive testing of the lowest-level functionality, and its coverage can be measured in many different ways. These provide varying levels of coverage, so it’s important to know how you measure your coverage.

By identifying the different modules and how information is passed around within the system, you can identify mismatches in module behavior or errors in system messages. The same considerations apply to API testing, where you can also step through the messages and fields using the guides to variable type testing described in Chapter 5, Black-Box Functional Testing.

Understanding the different states an application goes through means you can test them and their transitions thoroughly. At the lowest level...