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Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software
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
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
347 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2009
33 people are currently reading
392 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 9, 2012
This book is just a bunch of essays on testing: server-side testing, web-testing, automated, manual... Just stories and testers experience. Seems this book should have been for all, but the one who is not interested in 'ALL' will find not so much interesting here.
I liked only one article from there - written by Lisa Crispin. This was about her team and their successfull start with Agile. Really inspiring.
I liked only one article from there - written by Lisa Crispin. This was about her team and their successfull start with Agile. Really inspiring.
December 28, 2012
I started reading this book only months after it was released and finished it � well, (now) years later. One of the reasons for this is that early on one of the stories in that 23-stories-spanning collection was extremely uninteresting for me. So after years of it lying on my shelf I decided to get finally through it and the stories definitely got better. Still, also the rest of these articles remains a mixed bag. Some like "Software in Use" by Karen N. Johnson are extremely inspiring and simply great, others like Rex Black's "Beautiful Testing Satisfies Stakeholders" are the reason for a year-long break.
Another big gripe I have with this book is that every author (thankfully with some exceptions towards the end) uses the word "beautiful" or "beauty" at least once per paragraph. I get it, it's in the title, but after the first couple of stories it's just annoying like nothing I've ever seen in a book.
Another big gripe I have with this book is that every author (thankfully with some exceptions towards the end) uses the word "beautiful" or "beauty" at least once per paragraph. I get it, it's in the title, but after the first couple of stories it's just annoying like nothing I've ever seen in a book.
July 30, 2017
Bardzo długo czytałem tę książkę i niezwykle mnie ona wymęczyła. Jest to zbiór chaotycznie zebranych esejów z niezwykle irytującą manierą nazywania procesu testowania pięknym. Gdzieś tak po piątym artykule czytelnika zapewne trafi szlag, gdy zauważy, że autorzy wciskają słowo “piękny� gdziekolwiek się da, ot tak po prostu, aby zgadzało się z tytułem. Cała treść tej książki to generalnie trochę opowiastek z życia testerów i opowieści o projektach, w których uczestniczyli. Niektóre z nich rzeczywiście były ciekawe, jeśli jednak ktoś szuka informacji o tym, czym jest testowanie a nie opowiadań z życia testerów, to powinien omijać tę książkę szerokim łukiem.
I was reading this book for a long time and it was really tiresome. This is a set of chaotically gathered essays about software testing written with a really annoying manner of calling the whole process beautiful. After - let’s say - the fifth article a reader gets really annoyed as noticing that the authors put word beautiful in a random context just to be consistent with the title of the book. The whole content consists of just some stories from the testers� lives and projects in which they participated. Some of these stories were really interesting but if someone is looking for a book about testing itself and not about the life of software testers he should give it a wide berth.
I was reading this book for a long time and it was really tiresome. This is a set of chaotically gathered essays about software testing written with a really annoying manner of calling the whole process beautiful. After - let’s say - the fifth article a reader gets really annoyed as noticing that the authors put word beautiful in a random context just to be consistent with the title of the book. The whole content consists of just some stories from the testers� lives and projects in which they participated. Some of these stories were really interesting but if someone is looking for a book about testing itself and not about the life of software testers he should give it a wide berth.
January 24, 2021
A collection of useful and enjoyable essays/stories by various testers and developers. There is certainly value for any profession in software development, like developers, QA, managers, or users, and not only for testers.
Even though the content is a bit old for IT standards, the principles and techniques behind a useful testing approach are always modern and applicable.
Even though the content is a bit old for IT standards, the principles and techniques behind a useful testing approach are always modern and applicable.
August 13, 2018
change centric testing
context-driven testing
mutation testing
... to name a few nice approaches.
context-driven testing
mutation testing
... to name a few nice approaches.
December 5, 2012
I taught undergraduate courses in Software Engineering some ten years ago. Having moved up the academic managerial ladder since then, I read this collection of articles because I was curious to find out what practitioners deem interesting and worth writing about.
First of all, it is clear that there is a new generation of testers and writers. They mention some of the veterans I was used to reading like Cem Kaner, Brian Marick, James Back and Brett Pettichord whereas other veterans like Glenn Myers, Boris Beizer and Robert Binder seem to have disappeared from view.
Secondly, the book clearly reflects the massive shift that has led to web engineering, but includes little or no mention of testing for mobile apps or frameworks. For example, it would be fascinating to find out how augmented reality applications are being tested.
Thirdly, I found it curious that very few of the chapters are on security or usability testing per se. Judging from the book, the main issues seem to be exploratory testing, automating regression testing, scripted testing, mutation testing, scaling up testing, risk management (mentioned several times but not worked on in very much detail), xml and javascript testing, fuzz testing (which I confess was new to me in name, if not in theory), testing for memory leaks, the role of the tester in release decisions and teamwork, in the context of basically agile methodologies (an editorial bias?).
Some of the essays included are pretty lightweight, some go into more technical detail than I can now follow, and there are some are interesting and funny and perhaps appeal more to me now because they are more about managing testing (e.g. Was it good for you?, Software in use, Software development is a creative process ).
The book can appeal to many different kind of practitioners interested in software testing and I would definitely recommend some of the chapters to software engineering and information system undergraduate and graduate students as supplementory and fun readings. However almost everyone will find it easier and more worthwhile to read some chapters than others, depending on their background and experience and could probably find up to a third of the chapters outside their ken of interest.
The essays I found most interesting, well written and would strongly recommend to any reader wishing to broaden her knowledge of software testing are:
First of all, it is clear that there is a new generation of testers and writers. They mention some of the veterans I was used to reading like Cem Kaner, Brian Marick, James Back and Brett Pettichord whereas other veterans like Glenn Myers, Boris Beizer and Robert Binder seem to have disappeared from view.
Secondly, the book clearly reflects the massive shift that has led to web engineering, but includes little or no mention of testing for mobile apps or frameworks. For example, it would be fascinating to find out how augmented reality applications are being tested.
Thirdly, I found it curious that very few of the chapters are on security or usability testing per se. Judging from the book, the main issues seem to be exploratory testing, automating regression testing, scripted testing, mutation testing, scaling up testing, risk management (mentioned several times but not worked on in very much detail), xml and javascript testing, fuzz testing (which I confess was new to me in name, if not in theory), testing for memory leaks, the role of the tester in release decisions and teamwork, in the context of basically agile methodologies (an editorial bias?).
Some of the essays included are pretty lightweight, some go into more technical detail than I can now follow, and there are some are interesting and funny and perhaps appeal more to me now because they are more about managing testing (e.g. Was it good for you?, Software in use, Software development is a creative process ).
The book can appeal to many different kind of practitioners interested in software testing and I would definitely recommend some of the chapters to software engineering and information system undergraduate and graduate students as supplementory and fun readings. However almost everyone will find it easier and more worthwhile to read some chapters than others, depending on their background and experience and could probably find up to a third of the chapters outside their ken of interest.
The essays I found most interesting, well written and would strongly recommend to any reader wishing to broaden her knowledge of software testing are:
Was it good for you? by Linda Wilkinson, an extraordinary, cheeky, true to life and very funny account of tester culture,
Building open source QA communities by Martin Schröder and Clint Talbert, a fascinating essay on a key issue in open source development,
Collaboration is the cornerstone of beautiful performance testing by Scott Barber, an impeccable and very readable series of stories written to document critical incidents "...related to the importance of collaboration in performance testing."
Software in use by Karen Johnson, an outstanding and sobering reminder on the ultimate value and application of testing,
Software development is a creative process, by Chris McMahon, a wonderful, thought-provoking and spot on analogy of testing as a jazz performance, and
Seeding bugs to find bugs: Beautiful mutation testing by Andreas Zeller and David Schuler, a lovely and intelligent introduction to mutation testing.
June 17, 2019
I enjoyed reading the Beautiful Code book many years back and, for me, Beautiful Testing gave the same pleasure. Experts explaining how they figured out some fascinating problems.
How does one go about testing a random number generator? Even when we come to grips with the type of randomness we're after, what do we do to verify that the random number always lies in the range (0, 1]? Writing RNGs feel like an exception to the rule about always writing testable code.
Then again, how do we test an antivirus scanner? The quality attributes are completely different from the run-of-the-mill business or consumer application that I am familiar with. And so it was fascinating to see the plethora of tools the ClamAV team ended up throwing at the problem. I would not have thought it practical to deal with the mass of resulting output that Tomasz Kojm assures us can be put to good use so long as we have considerable patience.
The book is dated though so I'm going to rate it just three stars. The practical stuff in here isn't very practical anymore.
The ideas aged well though. Somehow Nandigama's ideas on change-centric testing have not ended up being built into test tooling! Test management tools really should provide predictive traceability for changes and about the health of the test suite.
How does one go about testing a random number generator? Even when we come to grips with the type of randomness we're after, what do we do to verify that the random number always lies in the range (0, 1]? Writing RNGs feel like an exception to the rule about always writing testable code.
Then again, how do we test an antivirus scanner? The quality attributes are completely different from the run-of-the-mill business or consumer application that I am familiar with. And so it was fascinating to see the plethora of tools the ClamAV team ended up throwing at the problem. I would not have thought it practical to deal with the mass of resulting output that Tomasz Kojm assures us can be put to good use so long as we have considerable patience.
The book is dated though so I'm going to rate it just three stars. The practical stuff in here isn't very practical anymore.
The ideas aged well though. Somehow Nandigama's ideas on change-centric testing have not ended up being built into test tooling! Test management tools really should provide predictive traceability for changes and about the health of the test suite.
June 17, 2015
Based on how the book defined a great tester, I never worked with such kind. On most cases, developers complain they are directing the success of the project while the tester reaps off more benefits. I do not agree with pairing testers and developers if both do not see goals of a project the same way.
The book seems to describe testing as a role separate from development but today, companies should only hire a development team that takes that role.
Good points of book include praise for automated testing. The book explores both terminology and technology for testing. When you consider all, it's far from simple and beautiful.
The book seems to describe testing as a role separate from development but today, companies should only hire a development team that takes that role.
Good points of book include praise for automated testing. The book explores both terminology and technology for testing. When you consider all, it's far from simple and beautiful.
February 29, 2016
To be clear, this is not a how-to book. It isn't a collection of parables. It is a collection of essays, some interesting and insightful, others you may skip after reading the first page or two. Every reader will have to decide which ones are which, because it will depend upon your past experience and present situation.
Anyone involved in software development will find value in this book. These are stories about real life experiences in software testing. Each one teaches a lesson about challenges met and overcome, and the lessons learned. Lessons developers, testers, and managers can learn to make testing more effective in their own organizations.
Anyone involved in software development will find value in this book. These are stories about real life experiences in software testing. Each one teaches a lesson about challenges met and overcome, and the lessons learned. Lessons developers, testers, and managers can learn to make testing more effective in their own organizations.
September 8, 2013
read this book while I'm starting a new role as test architect. I found it quite a good read, though didn't read all chapters. most of the contents are practical which you can bring to your daily routine. If you're a software tester or just someone who want to deliver a good quality softwar this book will teach you a lot.
September 26, 2015
Very readable. Each chapter is like an independent case study. This is a very valuable books for testing professionals since it exposes you to all the different learning that each professional had themselves!
Read
April 1, 2015Even though this was published in 2010, it still provides great insights into software testing...both the people that carry out this thankless job, and techniques and processes to do it right and better!
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April 25, 2013vf
July 27, 2013
I've found some of the assays really inspiring and got ideas for my own daily job
April 16, 2014
Wide collection of uhm.. 'job biographies'. Some might be more useful than others to your everyday work. Overall quite an enjoyable and quick read.
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