Customer Reviews

The Craft of Software Testing: Subsystems Testing Including Object-Based and Object-Oriented Testing

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I'm the senior author of Testing Computer Software, a book that focuses on black box software testing. I have strong opinions about books on testing, and don't recommend them lightly. Brian's book focuses on glass box techniques -- ways that programmers can test their own code. It's an excellent, instructive book.

This is an excellent book, Marick has done an a thorough job of addressing some of the fundamental issues of white box testing, explaining techniques and approaches clearly and concisely. He addresses the common issues that trip up whitebox testing organizations as well as the more advanced topics.

The book can be read productively by developers and testers. May be a little too technical for managers.

In 20+ years of testing software, I have encountered few books that I would recommend. This book is one of the best, addressing areas and techniques that are omitted from other works. Highly recommended

In the past I had been leery of whitebox testing because it was outside of the capabilities of most test engineers. However, this book has caused me to rethink my position for a number of reasons. Foremost is the fact that a good deal of web and e-commerce software these days is in the form of mark-up languages and scripts. While these lend themselves to blackbox testing, added assurance can be provided by inspections and other whitebox methods.

This book prepares test professionals to expand their skills and knowledge to take on these tasks by providing a thorough education in logic, operators, syntax and expressions. He also thoroughly covers object-oriented testing, with excellent advice on how to deal with states, classes and inheritance in the development and execution of test plans and cases.

What impressed me the most, however, was the chapter on testing bug fixes and maintenance changes. Mr. Marick's treatment of this topic is the best from among the dozen or so books I have on software testing. He provides a checklist of questions that the test engineer needs to answer, which will provide the basis for a sound test strategy. While this chapter addresses whitebox testing, a lot of the material can be effectively used in blackbox testing as well. One of the gems that I got from this chapter is an awareness that test suites decay over time after software has been released into production. This is an eye-opener because many test groups add to their regression test case library as new patches and releases are promoted into production, but few validate these test cases on a periodic basis.

To the best of my knowledge there is no other book that solely addresses whitebox testing. There are certainly few books on testing, white- or blackbox, that cover as much territory or go as deep as this one. Mr. Marick has provided a valuable addition to the testing profession with this book, and provides a clear path for test engineers to update their skills to meet the challenges of effectively testing web and e-commerce systems.

Brian did a very thorough work covering diverse aspects of software testing from a white-box perspective. He does not only provide in-depth analysis on how to analyze and test code but also includes knowledge that typically takes many years of experience to master. The section on Object-Oriented testing is particularly useful. This book has been quite handy to me while developing automation testing code for very complex technologies.

I first encountered this work as the manager of a software quality assurance team. In that capacity, it failed to lend substance to other works that we used as references. Steve McConnell's general works, Software Project Survival Guide, Rapid Development gave far better structure to our overall software management. For test specific direction, we found other works such as the Craft of Software Testing much more appealing.

Up to now, I have been writing and designing software have just started to look into software testing. Since the only review said this was a good book for programmers, I bought it. I did not like this book. It is very dry, sterile writing. The contents is too academic--lots of theory and not anything which I could pick up and say "That's a good idea and I can use that right away". The book covers topics such as Test requirement checklist, test specifications, test suites, improving testing, etc... If you already have a large test infrastructure in place then this book 'might' help you understand some of that process (or not). If you don't and want to start one then, this is not the place to go. Although it is not software testing, I would recommend the book "Refactoring--improving the design of existing code" by Martin Fowler. It is a easier read and you can get more out of it immediately than with this one.