Software Testing & Quality Assurance: From Traditional to Cloud Computing: Learn Software testing & quality assurance from the expert with 25 years of experience - Softcover

Ashfaque Ahmed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1499287925 ISBN 13: 9781499287929

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

Software development processes have evolved with evolution of computing platforms beginning with mainframes to desktops and now to cloud and mobile platforms. Due to this reason, there are tremendous changes taking place as to how to test the new software running on the latest platform. Every new trend is posing challenges to even the most experienced software testers as to how to make the strategy for testing these software products. Thankfully there are ways to deal with these challenges. Apart from testing perspective, there is the issue of ineffective quality assurance. Most often quality assurance is neglected during the software development process which results in high level of software defects in the product. Quality assurance should always come before testing on software projects but it is seldom practiced. This book focuses on the new challenges in the field of software testing and quality assurance and effectively demonstrates to deal with them. The book has 2 parts. Part 1 is all about software testing in various project environments right from client server to cloud and mobile platforms. Part 2 of the book is on software quality assurance. The book discusses the quality assurance processes as well as how to keep improving your processes. This is one aspect which is often ignored by organizations. The reader gets deep insight into all these areas in the book. The book definitely is valuable to the reader and readers will benefit from reading the book. The author of this book has over 25 years of experience in the software industry and has worked on more than 20 projects. He is also a popular author who has written best selling books on software quality assurance, software testing, software project management and SAP materials management.

About this title

From the Author

This book is written for people who want to learn software testing & quality assurance. Many people do not understand the difference between testing and quality assurance. Again many people do not understand difference between quality of the product and quality of the process which is used to create or test the product. It is important that the process quality should be good and only then good product creation can be expected. In our case, quality of the process of software product creation as well as quality of the process of testing the product should be good. This will ensure good product quality at least cost. Bad quality product results in high cost of maintenance. This should be totally avoided or else the owner of the software product will not be able to make any profit.This book explains the need of both good testing techniques as well as how to improve process quality. The concepts and techniques related to these 2 aspects is explained in the book which will be extremely helpful to the readers of the book.

From the Inside Flap

Software testing has been transformed in recent years. There has been more understanding about the subject of software testing due in part to increasingly more awareness about quality of software products.
 
Somebody may ask, why another book on software testing or quality assurance? There are already too many books in the market. Then why another book? Good question. If you happen to be in the industry for last 5 years, then you must have known what industry has gone through in these 5 years. Some of the happening space has to do with success of Google. Google made online experience very different in these 5 years than what it used to be in the dark ages of the internet before. Though Microsoft has hold on to its traditional business lines of personal productivity tools (MS Office suite) and the personal computer operating systems. But it has terribly failed in the arena of providing users with internet gizmos. Even its Internet Explorer web browser is losing its ground against Google's Chrome. Google has also helped in the new concepts of viral marketing, social media, cloud computing, etc.
 
These shifts in product offerings has necessitated the need to changes in underlying technology which made those products. So now we have technologies like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), web services, AJAX etc. We also are experiencing new models of software development like Scrum, Extreme Programming etc. These software development models are lean and agile.
 
With all these changes, you as a software tester get affected. Testing in these environments demands new set of skills and mind set. The new models of testing like agile, crowd sourcing etc. demand that you work more closely with both the customers as well as the developers. Your old skills may no longer be valid in these environments. Now is the time when you should adopt yourself to work in these environments. You should learn new skills and be able to work in these environments confidently.
 
Because of these reasons, this text will be extremely useful to you to learn and hone your new skills. Old textbooks may not help you in this regard. This exactly is the purpose, for which this book has been written.
 
From chapter 1 to chapter 5, I will rush you to learn the testing techniques and technology. Chapter 6 is totally devoted to doing testing functions in agile projects. Here you will learn what is expected of you as a tester on Scrum, Extreme Programming, or any other agile project. This text is also useful for people who are migrating or want to migrate to agile environments from waterfall environments. Chapter 6 covers this aspect. Chapter 7 is devoted to testing functions which are carried out on traditional (Waterfall like) projects. This work has been covered because many people still are involved on doing testing in traditional projects (in fact more than 90% people still work on projects which follow the traditional waterfall methodology. There is a good reason for that. We will see that in this chapter). Because of the nature of software projects, any predefined development model does not fit to all kinds of projects. Some projects are a better fit for lightweight model like agile while other projects are a better fit for heavyweight model like waterfall. So you working on a traditional project is not a surprise. In a nutshell, it depends. Then there is the case of working on projects which follow a methodology which is in between the lightweight and heavyweight camps. Process models like Rational Unified Process, Open Unified Process Model, Cleanroom Engineering etc. come in this category. Software testing activities and expectations of project teams from software testers on such projects is covered in Chapter 8. Essentially it is a case study which is discussed here and so you will learn all about software testing in such environments from a real world example.
 
As long as you are on to doing software testing, you do not care for other things. You only think that your value proposition to the organization you work for or to your customer is in ensuring quality of the software product you are testing. But to be competitive and be able to provide testing services, your project team and your organization must ensure that the cost of quality is reduced or at least competitive to the market expectations. This can be ensured by using quality assurance techniques. Sometimes you may have observed that same kind of defects keep coming from the same source. Instead of just detecting and fixing those defects, isn't it a good idea to find the root cause which was causing those defects and then eliminating the root cause so that no defects will be generated in the first place and thus no more of those defects will keep coming. The end result will be a good quality product at far lesser costs. Even though you might think that onus of reducing costs of quality rests with your organization but as a responsible employee of the organization, ultimately the responsibility of quality assurance comes on your shoulders. In whatever environment you are working (lightweight / heavyweight); you need to keep tweaking and enhancing your quality assurance processes. In essence, you will be working both on quality control (testing) as well as on quality assurance (defect prevention).
 
We will be discussing all quality assurance topics in part two of our book in chapters 9, 10 and 11.
 
In a nutshell, this text will become an essential part of your effort to ramp up your knowledge on software testing and quality assurance.
 
Have a good read! 

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1499287925
• ISBN 13: 9781499287929
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 194