A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design

Author: Lee Copeland List Price: $59.00 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 158053791X Publisher: Artech House (December, 2003) Edition: Hardcover Sales Rank: 77,390 Average Customer Rating: 5 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

It was interesting to read some of the quotes from Boris Beizer and other early testing authors. Some of those nuggets, such as the example of "Kiddie Pool vs. Real Pool" had a big impact on me years ago as I developed my understanding of what testing is about. Copeland achieves a nice level of coverage in this book, as he addresses black box and white box testing, as well as testing paradigms that shape the way someone may look at testing. The trade-offs between exploratory and scripted approaches are examined in particular.

I really like the readability of this book, due in large part to the humor that Copeland sprinkles through the book just when you need a smile.

Copeland also does an excellent job of thoroughly explaining by example how the various testing techniques are applied. He takes each technique step-by-step and breaks it down so that even a beginner can understand.

I found the chapter devoted to bug taxonomies very helpful by providing the lists by Beizer, Caner, Binder, Whittaker and others in a single location. I often tell my students to "start a bug collection" to understand the defects most common in the software they test. This is a natural and effective starting point for process improvement. The bug taxonomy can give you a head start on your own bug collection.

I can highly recommend this book to any tester. If you are looking for a self-study book in test planning, this is a great place to start!

For fun, he's included a winning entry from the worst fiction writing contest (Bulwer-Lytton) - which help me create a great frame of mind for reading the chapters. For practicality, Lee added Insights, Key Points, Notes, and Where to go for more information in the margins.

The chapter I liked the best was the pairwise testing chapter. Pairwise testing is an underutilized technique, and this chapter helps people understand which conditions should prompt a tester to consider pairwise testing and how to perform pairwise testing. Quoting from the book (p. 89), Lee says, "The exciting hope of pairwise testing is tha by creating and running between 1 percent to 20 percent of the tets you will find between 70 percent and 85 percent of the total defects." In my experience, pairwise testing provide me a technique when no other techniques were possible.

If you haven't thought about how to organize defects, then chapter 15, "Defect Taxonomies" will be helpful. He reviews some well-known taxonomies and concludes with the wise advice (p. 232) "The taxonomy that is most useful is your taxonomy, the one you create from your experience within your organization." Throughout the book, Lee helps the tester learn how to apply techniques to the product under test.

If you're not sure which test techniques you could apply to your product to improve your testing, this book will help you choose. If you're trying to teach a new test technique to a less seasoned tester, this book will help. If you're managing a test group and you don't know as much as you'd like about testing, you should definitely buy this book so you can talk to your testers. Lee has written an engaging, easy to understand book about ways to think about testing.

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