A look back at the best from a year ago
Software testing series: Pairwise testing
Very large and complex systems can be very difficult and expensive to test. Often, we inherit legacy systems with multiple man-years of development effort already in place, in the field and of unknown quality. With these systems, there are frequently huge gaps in the requirements documentation. Pairwise testing provides a way to test these large, existing systems. And on many projects, we’re called in because there is a quality problem.
Measuring the Cost of Quality: Software Testing Series
Should we test our software? Should we test it more?
The answer to the first question is almost invariably yes. The answer to the second question is usually “I don’t know.”
We write a lot about the importance of testing. We have several other posts in our series on software testing. How do we know when we should do more automated testing?
Software Testing Series: Black Box vs White Box Testing
Should I use black box testing or white box testing for my software?
You will hear three answers to this question – black, white, and gray. We recently published a foundation series post on black box and white box testing – which serves as a good background document. We also mention greybox (or gray box) testing as a layered approach to combining both disciplines.
Given those definitions, let’s look at the pros and cons of each style of testing.
Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing
Blackbox tests and whitebox tests.
These terms get thrown about quite a bit. In a previous post, we referenced Marc Clifton’s advanced unit testing series. If you were already familiar with the domain, his article could immediately build on that background knowledge and extend it.
Software testing can be most simply described as “for a given set of inputs into a software application, evaluate a set of outputs.” Software testing is a cause-and-effect analysis.
Marc Clifton’s Advanced Unit Testing articles
In a previous post, we mentioned a link to the first in a series of articles by Marc Clifton at The Code Project, a .NET resource site. Here are the links to all 5 of the articles in Marc’s series.