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 knows a lot about large-scale test automation, and shares some of his secrets on how to make it beautiful 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.
This book includes contributions from:
Adam Goucher Linda Wilkinson Rex Black Martin Schr? Clint Talbert Scott Barber Kamran Khan Emily Chen Brian Nitz Remko Tron? Alan Page Neal Norwitz Michelle Levesque Jeffrey Yasskin John D. Cook Murali Nandigama Karen N. Johnson Chris McMahon Jennitta Andrea Lisa Crispin Matt Heusser Andreas Zeller David Schuler Tomasz Kojm Adam Christian Tim Riley Isaac Clerencia
User review
Excellent read for both big and small concepts
This is a great book for testers, leads, and managers to read to get a better picture of where your testing process can bring value to your work. A few sections of this book didn't get me much value, but the vast majority of the book left me frantically scratching notes and folding corners of pages over. I read the book over a weekend and came away with a large number of major additions to my QA roadmap I use at work.
Kamran Khan's chapter on fuzz testing reinforced my ideas that choking your system with invalid parameters and input data is a tremendous way to shore up that system's stability. I also really enjoyed Lisa Crispin's and Alan Page's separate chapters, both of which emphasized value-driven, sensible approaches to test automation.
If you want an amazing story around how testing can directly impact the lives of those around you, read Karen Johnson's chapter `Software in Use.` Johnson ties a visit to an Intensive Care Unit to work she'd done on equipment in that ICU - it's rare anyone sees that practical a link to work we do in this industry.
Other highly worthwhile chapters include the piece on Python's development process, the overview on TDD, Mozilla's regression testing philosophy, and others. The Python chapter, in particular, is a tremendous testament to how a rigorous testing philosophy can guarantee very solid releases even with a broad, distributed team of varying skills.
As my examples above point out, there's a great amount of broad-stroke value in the book; however, a wealth of smaller, critical points abound in various chapters as well. Some weren't phrased exactly like this, but I've taken away these other concept as well:
* Track the source of your bugs (test plans, exploratory, developer, etc.) and pay special attention to bugs found by customers. These `escapees` point to areas to shore up in your test plan.
* Mindmaps are a great way to brainstorm out your test plan or test areas.
* Use small tools like fuzzers to help create your baseline input data.
* 100% passing rates for your automated tests isn't reasonable. Investigating 100% of your failing tests to determine whether the specific failure matters is reasonable. (I already firmly believed this, but it was nice to see in print!)
* Using image comparison to check formatting.
This is one of the better books I've read this year, and it's absolutely worth adding to your shelf.
User review
Excellent book on testing
This book is an inspirational collection of works to encourage us to do better testing. Every tester can learn plenty of great new testing tips from several industry experts in this must read beautiful book.
Theories are different than practicals and this book is all about practicals. Each author is an industry expert and they shared their best practices in a cool, interesting, and inspirational way. I was blown away by the insight presented by Karen Johnson on how the software she tested being used at an ICU.
The book focuses on all three main aspects of testing: beautiful testers(part I), beautiful processes (part II), and beautiful tools (part III).
We are all using these tips at our work place and we are getting great results. As Ken mentioned, `any one of the insights or practical suggestions from these testing gurus would be worth the price of the book`. And the best part is that all royalties go to an excellent cause called, `Nothing But Nets`.
User review
Great Book on Testing
Beautiful TEsting is written by a number of talented testers, developers and engineers. It is unique book since it does not focus one area of testing but gives the readers lot of different points of view with case studies, experience reports, and war stories that give valuable insight a normal book could not have given.
Personally, I have always thought as testng as something you have to do when you finish a software build but its just a necessary evil and does not really contribute to the real work which is building software for our client(s). But the theme of many of these chapters in this book is how you can make testing a part of your development life cycle and really incorporate the data that has been gathered in testing to you next release.
There is so much information in this book, it is hard to grasp it all so I recommend focusing on a few sections where it relates to your job position at work. Some essays are general that be applied to almost any developer or tester, then other chpaters are more specific such as the chapter on large scale automation, or XMPP, etc. But even so, the book reads so well rom chapter to chapter you will find yourself continuing to read as it leads itself to learning more and more about the different aspects of testing like an unfolding story.
I found that after reading a good part of the book, I really started to value testing a lot more and understood how valuable it really can be. The book is not written like a pure technical book, but the authors write in clear-easy to understand way that non-techinical people like testers (and not-software developers) can understand easily. I found myself stopping and starting as I was reading writing down lots of links to software and tools that I want to check out for my own testing needs. So I never thought this book was a hard-read, more like an interesting story.
This type of writing style by multiple authors I wish was done more with other books as most read like a boring college textbookor reference book that puts you to sleep after 30 minutes. I never thought I'd enjoy reading a book on testing, but I did, and I highly recommend it for anybody who does testing now or as part of their job (software or web developer, engineer, etc.)
Another extra bonus of buying this book is that 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. So its a win-win for everybody,,.
Get it!
Chapter break down:
Chapter 1 : Was It Good for You?
Chapter 2 : Beautiful Testing Satisfies Stakeholders
Chapter 3 : Building Open Source QA Communities
Chapter 4 : Collaboration Is the Cornerstone of Beautiful Performance Testing
Chapter 5 : Just Peachy: Making Office Software More Reliable with Fuzz Testing
Chapter 6 : Bug Management and Test Case Effectiveness
Chapter 7 : Beautiful XMPP Testing
Chapter 8 : Beautiful Large-Scale Test Automation
Chapter 9 : Beautiful Is Better Than Ugly
Chapter 10 : Testing a Random Number Generator
Chapter 11 : Change-Centric Testing
Chapter 12 : Software in Use
Chapter 13 : Software Development Is a Creative Process
Chapter 14 : Test-Driven Development: Driving New Standards of Beauty
Chapter 15 : Beautiful Testing As the Cornerstone of Business Success
Chapter 16 : Peeling the Glass Onion at Socialtext
Chapter 17 : Beautiful Testing Is Efficient Testing
Chapter 18 : Seeding Bugs to Find Bugs: Beautiful Mutation Testing
Chapter 19 : Reference Testing As Beautiful Testing
Chapter 20 : Clam Anti-Virus: Testing Open Source with Open Tools
Chapter 21 : Web Application Testing with Windmill
Chapter 22 : Testing One Million Web Pages
Chapter 23 : Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios
