The evolution of the test strategy
Chapter 1 introduced a style of testing: “overwhelm the interface with data.” This has advantages as it is quick, cheap, easy, and doesn’t even require the tester to have any knowledge of the application. The classic examples of this kind of testing are testing for February 30, or entering a date in the past to purchase plane tickets, perhaps the first day of the 13th month, and so on.
These sorts of test exercises are easy. They are fun. They are low-hanging fruit. And they are representative of the first build delivered to test for many organizations today.
Yet we have come a long way since we started our careers. Date time pickers, phone numbers, and email inputs – these sorts of things are likely to be generated by some open source tool. Instead of hand-creating a whitelist that fails to recognize that is a valid domain, programmers are likely to reuse something else. Thus, on many projects, the classic quick...