Testing techniques
Examining and improving existing tests and procedures Testing without a specification When the software has evolved, original requirements are no longer relevant, test coverage is incomplete and yet the team are able to maintain and improve a high quality, defect free product how can we limit the possible risk that…
One of the services our engineering team maintains takes a stream of live data combined with human input, makes complex mathematical calculations based on the data and then generates data that is consumed by subsequent services. The human input is made through a relatively simple UI, but the testing challenges…
Over the last 8 months and countless video calls, eagle eyed colleagues (and viewers of news programmes) have been spying on other’s peoples carefully (or carelessly) curated bookshelves, so I thought I’d recommend some of the books I’ve found useful. Testing basics Foundations of software testing is a comprehensive guide…
BASIC – 10 print “hello world” My first introduction to programming was in the 1980’s, using BASIC which was a common feature on the hobbyist computers of the time. For most people, computers were common in science fiction but had no practical applications in the home or workplace other than…
Given Something needs testingWhen Someone suggests using BDD/Cucumber/SpecFlowThen Some other people get really vocal – why? The test community seems to have a love hate relationship with BDD, but what actually is it, and how can it be used effectively? In software engineering, behaviour-driven development (BDD) is an Agile software…
Exploratory testing is a technique to examine a running system to find defects that were not considered in the requirements or only become apparent when the whole system is assembled. This differs from unscripted ad-hoc testing by applying some rules to guide and limit focus, and can be a very…
All pairs testing is a combinatorial technique to achieve adequate test coverage where testing all possible combinations would be resource intensive and the risk of less than complete testing is acceptable. The fundamental concept is that you test pairs of variables, rather than all possible combinations to achieve good statistical…
Continuing on from the previous post, some additional specification based test techniques. Decision tables testing Decision table testing can be applied to test the behaviour of logical conditions found within the specification. The decision table lists all possible inputs and all the corresponding outputs. Each column in the table corresponds…
Two of the most intuitive testing techniques, these help to derive test cases from documentation on how the software should behave and are specification based (or black box testing) techniques. Equivalence Partitioning Probably one of the most recognisable test techniques in the testers armoury is equivalence partitioning – a technique…
As alluded to in “what is software testing”, there are many distinct types of testing. Using the agile testing quadrants diagram, we can visualise where and when these types of tests are applied: Q1 Unit tests cover the smallest ‘unit’ of software – individual methods or functions, and the development…
