Software Testing Magazine

Software Testing Coverage and Negligence

November 5, 2012 0

In this article, Cem Kaner explores the technical concept of software testing coverage and the legal concept of software negligence. The article discusses the idea of complete coverage and the trade-off that software developers have to make when testing software. The main idea is that complete coverage is a misleading concept. “This “completeness” is measured only relative to a specific population of possible test cases”. You might achieve line coverage, but to achieve path coverage, you must test every path through the program and this is an impossible task. The goal of the software tester is to prioritize among tests in a careful way. This means to select the test strategy that could be rationally considered as the most likely to find the most bugs or the most serious bugs. This article has an appendix that lists 101 coverage measures.

Integrating Selenium After The Fact

November 1, 2012 0

This presentation discusses software testing automation after the fact – or adding Selenium to an existing application. With an existing application, the first step to “doin’ it rite” is to stop doing it so wrong. This talk explains where the bodies are buried when taking an existing Rails application and adding front-end testing after the fact, well after the fact (like a couple of years). What approaches worked, what hasn’t worked and why. Keywords: Cucumber, Jasmine, Rails, Sadness.

Python Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

October 30, 2012 0

This article from David Sale provides a short introduction to Behavior-Driven Development in Python. The article presents the principles of Behavior Driven Development and present the syntax of the Gherkin language that can be used with the freshen Python package, a clone of the famous Cucumber BDD framework written for Ruby. Freshen is an open source acceptance testing framework for Python that uses (mostly) the same syntax as Cucumber. A small step by step example is provided on how to use freshen and alternative tools are proposed.

Software Testing Mnemonics Card Deck

October 23, 2012 0

Karen Nicole Johnson has produced a nice word document that list all software testing mnemonics. You will find in more than 10 pages useful software testing heuristics like SACKED SCOWS or SLIME. For every mnemonic, there is a link to the article or blog post that explains it.

Being a Better Test Leader or Test Manager

Logging Bugs on Mobile Applications Testing

October 22, 2012 2

If you are a good software tester, but if you can’t communicate well what you find, you provide little value and are not very useful to your project team. This article gives you some hints specific to mobile applications testing on how to become a great bug reporter. Your teammates will love you for this and you will prove your value as a skilled team member.

Tracking your Selenium Tests

October 19, 2012 0

This video presents the lessons that a team has learned from having a big code base of Selenium tests for acceptance testing. It covers different ways they have developed to track their tests across different projects and how this has helped them to identify flaky tests.

Oracles in Software Testing

October 18, 2012 0

In this article, Cem Kaner discusses the usage of oracles when teaching software testing. In software testing, an oracle is the expected result of the test. It is an heuristic that should help you decide if the program passed your test. He ask the question: “If you don’t have authoritative oracles (“authoritative” = an oracle that is always correct), then how can you test? How can you specify a test in a way that a junior tester or a computer can run the test and correctly tell you whether the program passed it?”