Effective Software Testing: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your Testing Review

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(More customer reviews)A rarity in the testing world, here is a book I can wholeheartedly recommend for your average test practitioner or the QA Manager or QA Lead who feels they might be in over their head or who is not sure if they are missing something in their overall test effort. Having worked in the field of quality assurance and testing for more than ten years, I can say that the author hits on many elements that I often see not practiced in various organizations and that should be. The "Item"-focused nature of the chapters (providing the fifty steps) are a great way to present this material and bring in mind, to this reader, Steve McConnell's "Rapid Development", which did the same thing for development-related concerns. I had always wondered why the testing field did not have a book like that and now it does.
If I had to pick one nitpick (and in the grand scheme of things it is probably a relatively small one), one thing I could probably do without was the use of the word "nonfunctional testing". That is, unfortunately, a term all too often used in the discipline of testing and it should not be. For example, performance testing in the book is placed under the "nonfunctional" category and yet it is all about functionality: how quickly the functionality performs! The same thing with security: this is about how secure the application/site functions! (In other words, how secure the functionality is.) So this term is, I feel, incorrectly applied and as such will be used by more and more testers and this is often the stumbling block because usage of the term "non-functional" really often covers up what are, in effect, quality requirements and cost constraints. With that said, however, the material under the section on non-functional testing is well laid-out and is accurate in every respect, as far as I was concerned.
The breakdown of the book in terms of chapters and then items within the chapters is right on the money. And some of the items are wonderful kernels of knowledge that all testers should keep in mind. For example, Item 17 is "Verify that the System Supports Testability". This is a key concept that way too many testers seem to forget about early on and then have to deal with the ramifications of explaining why they cannot adequately test something later on. Yet another excellent element is Item 22, "Derive Effective Test Cases from Requirements". My immediate thought is: okay, but what if there are no requirements? Well, the author covers that very point in an excellent manner. In fact that is what all the items do: they provide a solid reference point for a variety of topics that can be researched by the conscientious tester or analyst. This book is a distillation of a broad array of concepts, from requirements analysis to automated testing tools to evaluating how effective a tester is. This wide scope will, I think, give the book a broad appeal and it serves to make it clear that there is quite a bit going on in the world of testing.
Overall, I think this is an excellent reference book for the average test group within an organization and is certainly worth having in your library if you in any way deal with the world of quality assurance or quality testing. It is rare that I give any book five stars (much less a testing book) but this one deserves it. Will you be an effective tester with this book? That all depends on how you apply what it talks about. But I can almost guarantee you will be an ineffective tester if you do not take much of what this book has to say seriously. Highly recommended.

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Topics include: Automated Testing, Nonfunctional Testing, and Managing the Test Execution. Softcover.

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