Introduction to Software Testing

Part I of this book laid down the foundations for modern software testing, and part II went into great detail about technical methods to design effective test case values from criteria. Eventually, of course, the concepts must be put into practice. This brings in many additional pragmatic concerns. Part III of this book provides a summary overview of the major aspects of putting the Model-Driven Test Design process into practice. The most obvious audience for these chapters are test team managers. We start with overall process concerns in this chapter, then discuss aspects of practical testing such as test plans, integration testing, regression testing, and the design and implementation of test oracles.

OVERVIEW

Many organizations postpone all software testing activities to the end of development, after the implementation has started, or even after implementation has ended. By waiting until late in the process, testing ends up compromised. Not enough resources (time or budget) remain, problems with previous stages have been solved by taking time and dollars from testing, and we do not have enough time to plan for testing. Instead of planning and designing tests, the developers have time only to run tests, usually in an ad hoc manner. The key point is that the goal is to create high-quality software, and the old adage that “quality cannot be tested in” is still very relevant. A tester cannot show up at the last minute and make a bad product good; high quality has to be part of the process from the beginning.

This section discusses how to integrate testing with development, where testing activities begin as soon as development activities begin, and are carried out in parallel with the development stages. Specific activities, including planning, active testing, and development-influencing activities, can be associated with each of the traditional lifecycle phases. These activities can be carried out by the developers or by separate test engineers, and can be associated with development stages within the confines of any specific development process. These testing activities allow the tester to detect and prevent faults throughout the software development process.