From the Publisher

Software Testing is the book for new or aspiring software testers interested in learning about this crucial part of the software development process. The complexity and size of today's software makes writing bug-free code extremely difficult, even for highly experienced programmers. Couple that with our increasing reliance on software for performing everyday tasks and its pervasiveness in the medical, telecommunications, manufacturing, and financial industries, and a software bug can spell disaster. Quality software can't be created with an ad- hoc, part-time, bug hunt. It requires a methodical and disciplined approach to preventing, finding, and reporting bugs. Software Testing will show you what it takes to be a successful software tester, assuring that you discover those nasty bugs before your customers do.

Booknews

A guide for new and aspiring software testers, covering how software testing fits into the software development process, software testing techniques, and finding a job as a software tester. Shows how to apply testing skills to common testing tasks, how to improve test efficiency with automation, and how to document and measure the test process. Includes quizes and answers. Patton is a software consultant in the private sector. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Product Details

• ISBN: 0672327988
  
• ISBN-13: 9780672327988
• Format: Paperback, 408pp
• Publisher: Sams
• Pub. Date: July 2005
• Edition Description: REV
• Edition Number: 2
• Sales Rank: 39,354

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Software Testing Background

The computer bug was born. Well, okay, it died, but you get the point. Welcome to the first chapter of Software Testing. In this chapter, you'll learn about the history of software bugs and software testing.

Highlights of this chapter include

• How software bugs impact our lives
• What bugs are and why they occur
• Who software testers are and what they do

Infamous Software Error Case Studies

It's easy to take software for granted and not really appreciate how much it has infiltrated our daily lives. Back in 1947, the Mark II computer required legions of programmers to constantly maintain it. The average person never conceived of someday having his own computer in his home. Now there's free software CD-ROMs attached to cereal boxes and more software in our kids video games than on the space shuttle. What once were techie gadgets, such as pagers and cell phones, have become commonplace. Most of us now can't go a day without logging on to the Internet and checking our email. We rely on overnight packages, long-distance phone service, andcutting-edge medical treatments.

Software is everywhere. However, it's written by people-so it's not perfect, as the following examples show.

Disney's Lion King, 1994-1995

In the fall of 1994, the Disney company released its first multimedia CD-ROM game for children, The Lion King Animated Storybook. Although many other companies had been marketing children's programs for years, this was Disney's first venture into the market and it was highly promoted and advertised. Sales were huge. It was "the game to buy" for children that holiday season. What happened, however, was a huge debacle. On December 26, the day after Christmas, Disney's customer support phones began to ring, and ring, and ring. Soon the phone support technicians were swamped with calls from angry parents with crying children who couldn't get the software to work. Numerous stories appeared in newspapers and on TV news.

It turns out that Disney failed to properly test the software on the many different PC models available on the market. The software worked on a few systems-likely the ones that the Disney programmers used to create the game-but not on the most common systems that the general public had.

Intel Pentium Floating-Point Division Bug, 1994

Enter the following equation into your PC's calculator:

If the answer is zero, your computer is just fine. If you get anything else, you have an old Intel Pentium CPU with a floating-point division bug-a software bug burned into a computer chip and reproduced over and over in the manufacturing process.

On October 30, 1994, Dr. Thomas R. Nicely of Lynchburg (Virginia) College traced an unexpected result from one of his experiments to an incorrect answer by a division problem solved on his Pentium PC. He posted his find on the Internet and soon afterward a firestorm erupted as numerous other people duplicated his problem and found additional situations that resulted in wrong answers. Fortunately, these cases were rare and resulted in wrong answers only for extremely math-intensive, scientific, and engineering calculations. Most people would never encounter them doing their taxes or running their businesses.

What makes this story notable isn't the bug, but the way Intel handled the situation:

• Their software test engineers had found the problem while performing their own tests before the chip was released. Intel's management decided that the problem wasn't severe enough or likely enough to warrant fixing it, or even publicizing it.
• Once the bug was found, Intel attempted to diminish its perceived severity through press releases and public statements.
• When pressured, Intel offered to replace the faulty chips, but only if a user could prove that he was affected by the bug.