Sommerville-Software-Engineering-10ed

252 Chapter 8 ■ Software testing
Key Points
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
Testing can only show the presence of errors in a program. It cannot show that there are no
remaining faults.
Development testing is the responsibility of the software development team. A separate team
should be responsible for testing a system before it is released to customers. In the user testing
process, customers or system users provide test data and check that tests are successful.
Development testing includes unit testing in which you test individual objects and methods;
component testing in which you test related groups of objects; and system testing in which you
test partial or complete systems.
When testing software, you should try to “break” the software by using experience and
guidelines to choose types of test cases that have been effective in discovering defects in
other systems.
Wherever possible, you should write automated tests. The tests are embedded in a program
that can be run every time a change is made to a system.
Test-first development is an approach to development whereby tests are written before the code
to be tested. Small code changes are made, and the code is refactored until all tests execute
successfully.
Scenario testing is useful because it replicates the practical use of the system. It involves
inventing a typical usage scenario and using this to derive test cases.
Acceptance testing is a user testing process in which the aim is to decide if the software is good
enough to be deployed and used in its planned operational environment.
Further Reading
“How to design practical test cases.” A how-to article on test-case design by an author from a
Japanese company that has a good reputation for delivering software with very few faults.
(T. Yamaura, IEEE Software, 15(6), November 1998) http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/52.730835.
“Test-driven development.” This special issue on test-driven development includes a good general
overview of TDD as well as experience papers on how TDD has been used for different types of
software. (IEEE Software, 24 (3) May/June 2007).
Exploratory Software Testing. This is a practical, rather than theoretical, book on software testing
which develops the ideas in Whittaker’s earlier book, How to Break Software. The author presents a
set of experience-based guidelines on software testing. (J. A. Whittaker, 2009, Addison-Wesley).
How Google Tests Software. This is a book about testing large-scale cloud-based systems and
poses a whole set of new challenges compared to custom software applications. While I don’t think
that the Google approach can be used directly, there are interesting lessons in this book for largescale
system testing. (J. Whittaker, J. Arbon, and J. Carollo, 2012, Addison-Wesley).