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

Classifying expected versus unexpected problems

There are two classes of problems you might hit while testing. The first kind is an expected problem, for instance, an unusual or invalid condition coming in from an external system. Perhaps you send a message and never receive a reply, or the reply contains a blank required field. Maybe you only support 10 simultaneous sessions, but someone tries to connect an 11th. These cases will result in failures, but they are all expected. When your code is running in the real world, people may try to misuse it, and you have to be ready to handle that input. All the tests in this chapter are of this first kind – expected problems. Even if the external system you are talking to is another internal module, you have to be able to handle receiving any kind of rubbish back from it. Input validation is necessary on any interface.

The other class of problem is something invalid happening within code – attempting to use a null pointer...