Software Test Design

This book describes how to comprehensively test software applications, from their initial specification through to all key types of testing. It covers security, usability, and maintainability, verifying key functions using black and white box testing, and pushing a system beyond its limits with destructive, load, and stress testing.

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A guide to writing comprehensive test plans covering exploratory testing and feature specification; black and white box testing; security, usability, and maintainability; and load and stress testing

Key Features

Cover all key forms of testing for modern applications systematically
Understand anti-patterns and pitfalls in system design with the help of practical examples
Learn the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of testing and how to combine them effectively

Book DescriptionSoftware 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.

What you will learn

Understand how to investigate new features using exploratory testing
Discover how to write clear, detailed feature specifi cations
Explore systematic test techniques such as equivalence partitioning
Understand the strengths and weaknesses of black- and white-box testing
Recognize the importance of security, usability, and maintainability testing
Verify application resilience by running destructive tests
Run load and stress tests to measure system performance

Who this book is forThis book is for anyone testing software projects for mobile, web, or desktop applications. That includes Dedicated QA engineers managing software quality, Test and test automation engineers writing formal test plans, Test and QA managers running teams responsible for testing, Product owners responsible for product delivery, and Developers who want to improve the testing of their code.