Exploratory Software Testing

James Whittaker has spent his career in software testing and has left his mark on many aspects of the discipline. He was a pioneer in the field of model-based testing, where his Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Tennessee stands as a standard reference on the subject. His work in fault injection produced the highly acclaimed runtime fault injection tool Holodeck, and he was an early thought leader in security and penetration testing. He is also well regarded as a teacher and presenter, and has won numerous best paper and best presentation awards at international conferences. While a professor at Florida Tech, his teaching of software testing attracted dozens of sponsors from both industry and world governments, and his students were highly sought after for their depth of technical knowledge in testing.  Dr. Whittaker is the author of How to Break Software and its series follow-ups How to Break Software Security (with Hugh Thompson) and How to Break Web Software (with Mike Andrews). After ten years as a professor, he joined Microsoft in 2006, and left in 2009 to join Google as the Director of Test Engineering for the Kirkland and Seattle offices. He lives in Woodinville, Washington, and is working toward a day when software just works.

• Foreword by Alan Page     xv Preface     xvii   Chapter 1    The Case for Software Quality     1 The Magic of Software     1 The Failure of Software     4 Conclusion     9 Exercises     9   Chapter 2    The Case for Manual Testing     11 The Origin of Software Bugs     11 Preventing and Detecting Bugs     12 Manual Testing     14 Conclusion     19 Exercises     20   Chapter 3    Exploratory Testing in the Small     21 So You Want to Test Software?     21 Testing Is About Varying Things     23 User Input     23     What You Need to Know About User Input     24     How to Test User Input     25 State     32     What You Need to Know About Software State     32     How to Test Software State     33 Code Paths     35 User Data     36 Environment     36 Conclusion     37 Exercises     38   Chapter 4    Exploratory Testing in the Large     39 Exploring Software     39 The Tourist Metaphor     41 “Touring” Tests     43     Tours of the Business District     45     Tours Through the Historical District     51     Tours Through the Entertainment District     52     Tours Through the Tourist District     55     Tours Through the Hotel District     58     Tours Through the Seedy District     60 Putting the Tours to Use     62 Conclusion     63 Exercises     64   Chapter 5    Hybrid Exploratory Testing Techniques     65 Scenarios and Exploration     65 Applying Scenario-Based Exploratory Testing     67 Introducing Variation Through Scenario Op