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

Giving user feedback on errors

Every application will suffer failures at some point, either through internal faults or failures of third parties on which it relies. The measure of a great application is failing rarely, recovering quickly, and providing feedback while the problem persists. During error conditions, letting the users know what’s going on is the difference between a good user experience and a support case.

Real-world example – Deliberately stopping the video

On one video application I worked on, we implemented protection against packet loss on video streams. One important tactic was to reduce the bit rate – if the available bandwidth had dropped, we needed to fit our video stream to the available speed. That meant reducing the quality of the video, and sometimes even stopping the video entirely so that the audio could get through and users could still talk to each other.

Unfortunately, we didn’t give the user any indication of what...