Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Number Of Pages: 304
ISBN: 0201794292
The knowledge of what constitutes a successful, end-to-end software testing effort is typically gained through experience. In this new book, noted testing expert Elfriede Dustin imparts the best of her collected wisdom. She presents fifty specific tips for a better testing program. These fifty tips are divided into ten sections, and presented so as to mirror the chronology of a software project. Using this book as a guide and reference, quality assurance professionals will be better able to insure the quality of their next application. While testing has historically been viewed as an afterthought in the grand scheme of software engineering, the success of an application, and possibly an organization, can rest on the shoulders of the testing team. That’s because the testing program functions as the final “quality gate” for an application. Testing allows or denies the transition of an application into the market. There are a multitude of seemingly minor tasks that must be performed and managed by the testing team.
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 is recommended highly.
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