Beautiful Testing

Successful software depends as much on scrupulous testing as it does on solid architecture or elegant code. But testing is not a routine process, it's a constant exploration of methods and an evolution of good ideas.

Beautiful Testing offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art. Through personal anecdotes, you'll learn how each of these professionals developed beautiful ways of testing a wide range of products -- valuable knowledge that you can apply to your own projects.

Here's a sample of what you'll find inside:

Microsoft's Alan Page shares some of his secrets about large-scale test automation.

Scott Barber explains why performance testing needs to be a collaborative process, rather than simply an exercise in measuring speed.

Karen Johnson describes how her professional experience intersected her personal life while testing medical software.

Rex Black reveals how satisfying stakeholders for 25 years is a beautiful thing

Mathematician John D. Cook applies a classic definition of beauty, based on complexity and unity, to testing random number generators

All author royalties will be donated to the Nothing But Nets campaign to save lives by preventing malaria, a disease that kills millions of children in Africa each year.

Contents

I. BEAUTIFUL TESTERS

1. Was it good for you? (Linda Wilkinson)

2. Beautiful testing satisfies stakeholders (Rex Black)

3. Building open source QA communities (Martin Schröder, Clint Talbert)

4. Collaboration is the cornerstone of beautiful performance testing (Scott Barber)

II. BEAUTIFUL PROCESS

5. Just peachy: Making office software more reliable with fuzz testing (Kamran Khan)

6. Bug management and test case effectiveness (Emily Chen, Brian Nitz)

7. Beautiful XMPP Testing (Remko Troncon)

8. Beautiful large-scale test automation (Alan Page)

9. Beautiful is better than ugly (Neal Norwitz, Michelle Levesque, Jeffrey Yaskin)

10. Testing a random number generator (John D. Cook)

11. Change-centric testing (Murali Nandigama)

12. Software in use (Karen N. Johnson)

13. Software development is a creative process (Chris McMahon)

14. Test-driven development: Driving new standards of beauty (Jennitta Andrea)

15. Beautiful testing as the cornerstone of business success (Lisa Crispin)

16. Peeling the glass onion at Socialtext (Mathew Heusser)

17. Beautiful testing is efficient testing (Adam Goucher)

III. BEAUTIFUL TOOLS

18. Seeding bugs to find bugs: Beautiful mutation testing (Andreas Zeller, David Schuler)

19. Reference testing as beautiful testing (Clint Talbert)

20. CLAM Anti-virus: testing open source with open tools (Tomasz Kojm)

21. Web application testing with Windmill (Adam Christian)

22. Testing one million web pages (Tim Riley)

23. Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios (Isaac Clerencia)

Contributors

Index