Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Testing

by Elfriede Dustin

Book Overview

Emphasises on the integration of testing into various phases of the software development life cycle, from requirements definition to design and final coding. This book includes fifty lessons that... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201794292
• ISBN13: 9780201794298
• Release Date: January 2002
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent advice with a wider audience than QA

Think of this book as a 300 page checklist that uncovers gaps in the testing process, some glaring and some more subtle. From that perspective you are not getting yet another book on how to test software, but insights into the author's extensive experience and knowledge. Therein lies the value of this book, and why it is applicable to not only software QA professionals at all experience levels, but to project managements, application support professionals, and developers.The book is divided into chapters that address a specific phase in the testing process, starting with requirements through to text execution. I won't dwell on the content that will be of particular interest to QA practitioners because the entire book applies. Instead, I'll cite the information that other stakeholders in application delivery will find useful because I believe this book has a much wider audience than just QA:- Chapter I (Requirements) should be read by project managers and the requirements team. It underscores the importance of integrating the QA team at the earliest stage of a project.- Chapter IV (System Architecture) shows the importance of communications between the architects and design team and the QA team. Specifically, if QA isn't working closely with architecture, designs may not be testable, which will impose significant costs downstream in the applications delivery process.- Chapter VI (Unit Testing) gives advice on how to effectively engage the development team in the overall quality strategy.- Chapter X (Managing Test Execution) has excellent advice on managing defects, which has a plethora of stakeholders and roles, from support, business and development domains. In addition, the guidance on bounding the test execution cycle is not of primary interest to project managers, but also to business stakeholders. It's a sad commentary on the way some organizations manage the test environment when advice for separating the test and development environments need to be included, but this commingling happens too often and I was happy to see it included in this chapter.This is not a 'how to test' book, it is a compilation of pitfalls and how to avoid them. It is a welcome addition to the growing software quality body of knowledge and one that I recommend highly.

A deft, concentrated treatment.

I proof-read this book and it was so good I felt compelled to read it a second time! I have read several of Elfriede's books and I always find them well organized and consistently readable.Elfriede is a well known authority in this field and in Effective Software Testing she has produced a state of the art handbook for a comprehensive testing effort.The format is very pragmatic. The book is split into different areas in a useful sequence and each area has an overview with seperate following chapters providing more detail. The chapters are concise and the subject area's contents are concentrated and free of jargon. We have implemented many of these precepts in our organization to very good effect. Highly reommended!

Outstanding testing techniques.

This book contains a cornucopia of excellent experience based testing practices. This book is very informative for neophyte testers, mid-level testers, qa managers, and organizations struggling with preliminary testing tasks, specifically the most important areas of initial testing to focus on such as test planning, creating test cases, unit testing, etc. The author excels in providing techniques to the readers that will help the readers "build an application with quality as opposed to testing for quality". The author addresses all important techniques and topics related to the testing effort that parallels all conventional phases of software development.I particularly enjoyed the author's pellucid writing style, organization of materials and experience based insights into the world of testing. I found that even as an experienced tester with several years of experience leading software testing efforts at several fortune 500 companies I was able to learn a great deal from this book. Happy readings!

Excellent Testing Guide

As an experienced test manager, I find this book to be an excellent guide that can be used as a checklist while conducting test planning.The table of contents of this book takes the reader through the entire software test planning effort, allowing me to double-check that I didn't miss anything. This book discusses such important topics as "automated unit testing," "developing unit tests before implementation, popularized by extreme programming," "how to gain understanding of the system architecture," "the importance of gray box testing and logging techniques," and provides other excellent test planning ideas. I highly recommend this book to any test professional.

Excellent reference guide for testers.

A rarity in the testing world, here is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend for your average test practitioner or the QA Manager or QA Lead who feels they might be in over their head or who is not sure if they are missing something in their overall test effort. Having worked in the field of quality assurance and testing for more than ten years, I can say that the author hits on many elements that I often see not practiced in various organizations and that should be. The "Item"-focused nature of the chapters (providing the fifty steps) are a great way to present this material and bring in mind, to this reader, Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development", which did the same thing for development-related concerns. I had always wondered why the testing field did not have a book like that and now it does.If I had to pick one nitpick (and in the grand scheme of things it is probably a relatively small one), one thing I could probably do without was the use of the word "nonfunctional testing". That is, unfortunately, a term all too often used in the discipline of testing and it should not be. For example, performance testing in the book is placed under the "nonfunctional" category and yet it is all about functionality: how quickly the functionality performs! The same thing with security: this is about how secure the application/site functions! (In other words, how secure the functionality is.) So this term is, I feel, incorrectly applied and as such will be used by more and more testers and this is often the stumbling block because usage of the term "non-functional" really often covers up what are, in effect, quality requirements and cost constraints. With that said, however, the material under the section on non-functional testing is well laid-out and is accurate in every respect, as far as I was concerned.The breakdown of the book in terms of chapters and then items within the chapters is right on the money. And some of the items are wonderful kernels of knowledge that all testers should keep in mind. For example, Item 17 is "Verify that the System Supports Testability". This is a key concept that way too many testers seem to forget about early on and then have to deal with the ramifications of explaining why they cannot adequately test something later on. Yet another excellent element is Item 22, "Derive Effective Test Cases from Requirements". My immediate thought is: okay, but what if there are no requirements? Well, the author covers that very point in an excellent manner. In fact that is what all the items do: they provide a solid reference point for a variety of topics that can be researched by the conscientious tester or analyst. This book is a distillation of a broad array of concepts, from requirements analysis to automated testing tools to evaluating how effective a tester is. This wide scope will, I think, give the book a broad appeal and it serves to make it clear that there is quite a bit going on in the world of testing.Overall, I think this