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

Fail as little as possible

What counts as a test passing when the functionality is failing? In the previous example, immediately identifying the problem and informing the customer exactly how to fix it is the best possible result. For external APIs, the criterion is similar – the best outcome is clearly stating in the logs or error messages which field caused the problem and why.

Sometimes, even the best failure mode is less than ideal. For instance, a failure to reach the infrastructure in a web application may result in a gateway timeout message. That is useless to end users – they are unlikely to understand it, and there is nothing they can do about it. The best thing you can do in that case is to show an unhappy robot or other symbol and let the user know they’ve done nothing wrong. They just need to wait, safe in the knowledge that somewhere on a distant console, a light has turned red, and an engineer is desperately trying to recover the service.

In...