Software Testing Articles, Blog Posts, Books, Podcasts and Quotes
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.
Software and system testing cost the commercial and defense industry hundreds of millions of dollars annually. In addition, conducting each set of tests takes multiple man-months, delaying time to market of key technologies. In this current economic environment, organizations are looking for ways to reduce the cost of testing and time to market while ensuring that defects are not passed on to the customer.
Behavior-driven development (BDD) is similar to test-driven development (TDD), but the tests for BDD are written in an easier-to-understand language so that developers and clients alike can clearly understand what is being tested. In this article based on chapter 2 of Rails 3 in Action, the authors discuss two tools for BDD: RSpec and Cucumber.