Quality Code: Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns

by Stephen Vance

Test-driven, test-first, and test-early development practices are helping thousands of software development organizations improve their software. Now, in Quality Software Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns, Stephen Vance builds on all that’s been learned about test-driven development, helping you achieve unprecedented levels of first-time quality. Using real-world code examples, this guide introduces patterns, principles, and more than two dozen detailed techniques for testing any software system more fully, effectively, and painlessly. Vance presents a conceptual framework to help you focus your efforts and design recommendations for improving testability across the software lifecycle, and also provides hands-on guidance to simplify testing of the full spectrum of code constructs. You’ll learn how to choose the best testing techniques for every situation, from the most common scenarios to threading. Two complete case studies put it all together, walking you through testing a brand-new Java application and an untested “legacy” JavaScript jQuery plugin. Whether you’re developing cutting-edge code for a new start-up, or maintaining an unruly old system, this guide will help you deliver exactly what you quality code.

 

• Simplify unit testing of all your code—and improve integration and system testing

• Delineate intent and implementation to promote more reliable and scalable testing

• Overcome confusion and misunderstandings about the mechanics of writing tests

• Test “side effects,” behavioral characteristics, and contextual constraints

• Understand subtle interactions between design and testability—and make them work for, not against, you

• Discover core principles that guide your key testing decisions

• Explore testing getters/setters, string handling, encapsulation, override variations, visibility, singleton patterns, error conditions, and more

• Reproduce and test complex race conditions deterministically

 

Genres: Software, Programming, Technology

Kindle Edition

First published July 25, 2013

Reviews

[Franck Chauvel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This books describes techniques to build a scaffolding of automated tests. They cover string verification, exceptions, testing race conditions, etc. While those are very technical, I sense some wisdom as a watermark to exploit all "seams" (as in Working Effectively with Legacy Code) and to decouple tests from code. I gave this book only three stars so far, but it deserves another read and some more hours behind the keyboard ...

[Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

To t is very clear that the author is quite knowledgeable and is constantly searching for information that will further his knowledge. However, this book also demonstrates well one of my general problems with technical manuals/textbooks of the IT industry: making the real message hard to understand by over naming or the use of acronyms. Far too much of the examples could be made so much easier to understand if there wasn't all the names and acronyms given. Cut to the chase and just give us the real info!

My biggest problem with this book though is that the author points out that most people understand the coding principles to be able to develop with a test driven mindset, they just need to understand the concept behind test driven development before they will actually do it. While I agree with his assessment, it is extremely frustrating to have the real problem be so succinctly stated and then immediately ignored in favor of what I'm sure the book publishers think will appeal more to their intended audience.

Please publishers, do give us what you think we want to hear/read/see. Give us what we really need, what the taglines promise!

This book was appropriately named but poorly taglined. I think that I would better be able to understand the code or even be able intuit the code if I knew the concept of or why of test driven development.

[LIBBY]

Excellent read.

[Miguel Alho · Rating 4 out of 5]

its an interesting read and worth going through. I think part 2 is The most interesting with good examples and techniques.