Quality Web Systems: Performance, Security, and Usability

by Jeff Rashka, Elfriede Dustin, Debbie Lafferty

Enterprise Web developers are trapped between a rock and a hard place: they're under tremendous pressure to get to market fast -- but if they deploy systems of poor quality, they will drive away customers -- losing revenue and market share for years to come. Quality Web Systems gives software professionals start-to-finish resources for enhancing quality and accelerating development at the same time. Quality Web Systems identifies...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201719363
• ISBN13: 9780201719369
• Release Date: August 2001
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book on various quality topics

This book was a joy to read. It gives a great overview of quality issues within "Web systems" - meaning Web applications and architectures. The book balances a too-specific look with a too-general look and succeeds quite well in a balanced treatment that will make the whole worth the attention of any quality assurance or quality tester professional in the Information Technology industry.In particular, the second chapter, on the RSI Approach, is a nice addition as this is something that most practitioners of quality subjects will not find elsewhere and the general subject matter is generally that which is avoided in books of this type. Another topic often avoided in these books is that of usability and accessibility concerns and yet these are covered here in good detail chapter six.In general, I think the book offered a great amount of detail just where it was needed and gave a lot of "mini best-practices" in each chapter with the use of bulleted lists to highlight specific points. The detail of the book extends to various topics, like performance, compatibility, usability, and security - all topics that are of high concern in the current world of making qualitly Web systems that customers and user respond to. The appendices in the book are also excellent. The "Test Tool Evaluations" section will be a welcome addition to those who wish there are more concise evaluation forms for automated tool solutions.I highly recommend this book to quality assurance/testing professionals, quality assurance managers, and even those who work more in the project management and development spheres. Those latter will get benefit from the book because the book manages to highlight topics of concern to both groups and also gives them insight into the quality aspects of the projects and products that are developed within an organization.

Once again another blockbuster!

This is one of the best quality assurance books in a while... Thinner than Automated Software Testing, but as informative! If you are doing any kind of web testing, this one's a must have for your library. Talks about all aspects of software testing on the web. I give it 5 stars hands down!

Covers all of the major issues and factors

Although the authors of this book are noted experts in software testing this book goes far beyond testing by addressing the full range of quality and design issues for web-based systems.All of the major elements of web-engineering and quality are addressed, including SECURITY (this is the first test or quality book that fully acknowledges the relationship between quality and security, which is a cornerstone of the Reliability-Availability-Support triad for systems in production), PERFORMANCE (I especially liked this section because it got into the guts of performance and scalability), COMPATIBILITY (essential for ensuring that your system works with the world of users over whom you have no control - web-based systems can and usually do extend into the great unknown), and USABILITY (this will make or break a commercial web site).Aside for the complete coverage of all of the important topics that need to be considered, and the life cycle approach to quality and testing this book contained a real gem: RSI approach to use cases. RSI (Requirements-Service-Interface) is an interesting and highly useful approach to use cases. Some key strengths of using the RSI paradigm is that you will ensure traceability between requirements and the services and interfaces that are implemented. Moreover, this approach partitions services and interfaces, which allows you to manage the complexities when developing a test strategy and associated test cases. To me the chapter on RSI was worth the price of the book. Overall, this is a solid book that covers testing, as well as the larger domain of systems quality. It gives some unique insights of issues and factors related to testing, but is not solely about web testing. It should be read by all key team members including requirements analysts, architects, developers, test engineers and project managers *before* a web project is initiated.

Finally, A Book to Create a True Dot Com not Dot Bomb

This book finally puts into perspective the real reason a lot of the dot coms busted, lack of orderly web site/business planning.This book goes far beyond just testing for the web, it addresses the need to understand you just can't throw a business on the internet because you happen to be able to create a web-page. It keeps the end-user, ultimately the customer, in mind at all times. It provides insightful case studies so the reader has a comparative base, and finally provides some good tools to boot.

Practical and relevant

Quality Web Systems is another thorough and complete book by the same team who wrote Automated Software Testing. I am finding the same quality and insight in this book. Web Systems testing is THE critical testing area in software quality assurance today. I appreciate the thoughtful and practical approach this text takes. I found the sections on Usability Test Strategies and the test tool evaluation guide particularly relevant to my situation. I think this is a book every tester should have. I highly recommend it.