Software Testing Techniques

The best book I have read on software testing. The techniques in this book have served me well on many projects. The techniques are platform and technology independent. Just pure software engineering. It's a must for software quality control professionals.

This book is academic in the best possible sense. The heavy artillery. You can make a career out of the stuff this book contains. Not a book for beginners but certainly something someone with an introduction to the art will want to read.

Every professional and commercial software development organization spends a great deal of time in the testing and validation of their software. The testing process, driven either by legal or financial requirements, can be expensive and may thwart the planned deployment of the application. Many studies indicate that the testing process can even take three times as long as the actual coding itself. Indeed, software development done under the ISO 9000 or FDA auspices can be extremely time intensive. This book gives a lengthy and fairly comprehensive overview of software testing that emphasizes formal models for testing. In the introduction, the author gives a general overview of the testing process and the reasons and goals for testing. He carefully distinguishes between testing and debugging, and advocates these as separate activities. Testing according to the author is done to find bugs; whereas debugging is done to find the origin of the bugs and fix them. The author characterizes testing as either functional or structural. Functional testing treats the program from the user's point of view, with inputs given to the program, and then the outputs are checked for conformance to a specified reference. Structural testing examines how the program is implemented, in terms of programming style, design, etc. The notion of an oracle is defined as any program or process that specifies the expected outcome of a collection of tests. The author clearly identifies and characterizes the different types of tests that arise in development organizations, such as unit testing, regression testing, stress testing, and integration testing. In chapter 2, the author classifies the different types of bugs that could arise in program development. Bugs are classified according to functional, structural, data, coding, system, and design and test bugs. He stresses the need to not have a religious attitude about bugs, namely that all software will have them to some degree, and therefore it is the quality measure of the software that is important in deploying the application. If a minor bug requires a major software rewrite for example, it would not be advantageous to fix this bug. Chapter 3 takes up the notion of path testing, which, according to the author, is based on the use of the program's flow control. The tester selects a set of test paths through the program with the goal of executing every statement and branch of the program at least once. The author summarizes well the flowgraph and process block techniques used to implement path testing. In chapter 4, the author introduces the concept of a transaction flow as a representation of a system's processing. The flowgraphs developed in chapter 3 are used here to create a transaction flowgraph for functional testing. The transaction flow representation gives a way to model the system's behavior. The author's treatment here is very detailed, and he gives several useful tips on how to conduct this kind of testing. The

If a foreigner taking English as a second language could easily catch what author wanna present , then you should treat this book as a textbook for new entry . This book covers all the basic topics of software testing .

Software Testing Techniques by Boris Beizer is an absolute must for anyone who has a serious interest in software testing. This 549-page book covers nearly every aspect of the process of finding errors in computer programs, moving from basic definitions and terminology through detailed and easy-to-understand explanations of most testing strategies in use today, finishing with a chapter on implementing testing strategies in a development organization. This book is written with the practitioner in mind, but can equally well be used by students in software engineering curriculums. It presents both theory and practice in a thorough and clear manner, illustrating both concepts and practical techinqes with numerous realistic examples. All in all, in this reviewers mind, this is a very good book on software testing, in particular for the active practicioner, but could definitely be used by students of software engineering.