Software Testing Articles, Blog Posts, Books, Podcasts and Quotes
Manual testing is a time consuming process. In addition, regression testing, because of its repetitive nature, is error-prone, so automation is highly desirable. Robot Framework is simple, yet powerful and easily extensible tool which utilizes the keyword driven testing approach. Easy to use tabular syntax enables creating test cases in a uniform way. Ability to create reusable high-level keywords from existing keyword ensures easy extensibility and reusability.
Exploratory testing is a software testing technique that combines simultaneous learning, test design and test execution. Shmuel Gershon has proposed two dices that allows to bring a little bit of fun to any exploratory testing session. One dice includes the six Product Elements from James Bach and the other twelve Quality Characteristics from The Test Eye team. Each combination of these two dices provides a new angle for testing an application. For those who are allergic to origami and don’t want to build their own dices, an online version exists that will roll them for you.
This article by Adam Goucher identifies a handful of heuristics that apply to software testing automation. While not an exhaustive set, it is a useful one, and it will put you on the path to identifying and collecting your own set of automation heuristics. Heuristics are used in testing as rules of thumb or prompts for solving a particular problem or class of problems.
Load testing is almost always conducted to address one or more risks related to expense, opportunity costs, continuity, and/or corporate reputation. In two blog posts, Tarun Arora discusses the topic. In part 1, he explains why Performance Testing the application is important, presents the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies. In part 2, he analyzes the details of web performance and load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application.
The unit testing feature is part of the support within the Oracle SQL Developer family of products. This article presents the SQL Developer unit testing framework for testing PL/SQL objects, such as functions and procedures, and monitoring the results of such objects over time. You create tests, and for each you provide information about what is to be tested and what result is expected. The SQL Developer implementation of unit testing is modeled on the classic and well known xUnit collection of unit test frameworks.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a programmer practice that’s been employed by a growing number of software development teams for the past dozen years. Does TDD impact you personally? If you’re a manager, what should you expect from teams using TDD? How do you know if they’re doing a good job? Is there any advantage of TDD over sporadic after-the-fact unit testing?
in this blog post, Lisa Crispin proposes a short explanation on how to use and interpret the Agile Testing Quadrants defined by Brian Marick. The quadrants are a taxonomy that can help teams to plan their testing and to make sure they have all the resources they need to accomplish it.