Exploratory Software Testing: Tips, Tricks, Tours, and Techniques to Guide Test Design
Description
How to Find and Fix the Killer Software Bugs that Evade Conventional Testing
In Exploratory Software Testing , renowned software testing expert James Whittaker reveals the real causes of today's most serious, well-hidden software bugs--and introduces powerful new "exploratory" techniques for finding and correcting them.
Drawing on nearly two decades of experience working at the cutting edge of testing with Google, Microsoft, and other top software organizations, Whittaker introduces innovative new processes for manual testing that are repeatable, prescriptive, teachable, and extremely effective. Whittaker defines both in-the-small techniques for individual testers and in-the-large techniques to supercharge test teams. He also introduces a hybrid strategy for injecting exploratory concepts into traditional scripted testing. You'll learn when to use each, and how to use them all successfully.
Concise, entertaining, and actionable, this book introduces robust techniques that have been used extensively by real testers on shipping software, illuminating their actual experiences with these techniques, and the results they've achieved. Writing for testers, QA specialists, developers, program managers, and architects alike, Whittaker answers crucial questions such as:
Why do some bugs remain invisible to automated testing--and how can I uncover them?
What techniques will help me consistently discover and eliminate "show stopper" bugs?
How do I make manual testing more effective--and less boring and unpleasant?
What's the most effective high-level test strategy for each project?
Which inputs should I test when I can't test them all?
Which test cases will provide the best feature coverage?
How can I get better results by combining exploratory testing with traditional script or scenario-based testing?
How do I reflect feedback from the development process, such as code changes?
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Persons
James Whittaker has spent his career in software testing and has left his mark on many aspects of the discipline. He was a pioneer in the field of model-based testing, where his Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Tennessee stands as a standard reference on the subject. His work in fault injection produced the highly acclaimed runtime fault injection tool Holodeck, and he was an early thought leader in security and penetration testing. He is also well regarded as a teacher and presenter, and has won numerous best paper and best presentation awards at international conferences. While a professor at Florida Tech, his teaching of software testing attracted dozens of sponsors from both industry and world governments, and his students were highly sought after for their depth of technical knowledge in testing.
Dr. Whittaker is the author of How to Break Software and its series follow-ups How to Break Software Security (with Hugh Thompson) and How to Break Web Software (with Mike Andrews). After ten years as a professor, he joined Microsoft in 2006, and left in 2009 to join Google as the Director of Test Engineering for the Kirkland and Seattle offices. He lives in Woodinville, Washington, and is working toward a day when software just works.
Content
Foreword by Alan Page xv
Preface xvii
Chapter 1 The Case for Software Quality 1
The Magic of Software 1
The Failure of Software 4
Conclusion 9
Exercises 9
Chapter 2 The Case for Manual Testing 11
The Origin of Software Bugs 11
Preventing and Detecting Bugs 12
Manual Testing 14
Conclusion 19
Exercises 20
Chapter 3 Exploratory Testing in the Small 21
So You Want to Test Software? 21
Testing Is About Varying Things 23
User Input 23
What You Need to Know About User Input 24
How to Test User Input 25
State 32
What You Need to Know About Software State 32
How to Test Software State 33
Code Paths 35
User Data 36
Environment 36
Conclusion 37
Exercises 38
Chapter 4 Exploratory Testing in the Large 39
Exploring Software 39
The Tourist Metaphor 41
"Touring" Tests 43
Tours of the Business District 45
Tours Through the Historical District 51
Tours Through the Entertainment District 52
Tours Through the Tourist District 55
Tours Through the Hotel District 58
Tours Through the Seedy District 60
Putting the Tours to Use 62
Conclusion 63
Exercises 64
Chapter 5 Hybrid Exploratory Testing Techniques 65
Scenarios and Exploration 65
Applying Scenario-Based Exploratory Testing 67
Introducing Variation Through Scenario Op