In this article, Andrew Hunter shares his opinion that unit tests and test driven development (TDD) now dominate the types of test that are used in software development. This situation has limited the attention available for other software testing types, such as the integration tests. Thus he asks the question: “Are unit tests overused?“
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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