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Effective Test Design

One of the core problems of testing is the infinity of all possible tests. Good test design involves selecting a small subset of these tests. In this course participants will learn how to effectively choose the most appropriate test cases using different test techniques.

Participants will learn:

  • How to use test oracles and heuristic
  • How to decide when and why one technique should be used instead of another
  • How knowledge of test techniques facilitates the creation of tests.
  • Choosing the right test case for every situation will hence be done with more area of knowledge and greater certainty for good results

Participants will explore in more detail:

  • How to use some of the well-known and recognized black-box test design techniques and their advantages/disadvantages depending on the development context, test attributes and information objectives.
  • How to write bug reports in a way that gives each bug its best chance of being fixed.
  • What to do when there is no specification, or when no bugs can be found even if we know “they are still there”.

Topics

Introduction to Effective Test Design
  • What are characteristics of an effective test case?
  • Should we design most tests early in development?
  • Information objectives
  • How to choose a test technique?
  • What are test design underlying principles?
Test oracles
  • What is a test oracle?
  • Using oracles and the oracle problem
  • What is a heuristic?
Complete testing
  • Complete testing
  • Test coverage
Test design techniques and methods
  • Equivalence partitioning, Boundary analysis, All-pairs, Cause effect graphing, Specification-based, Risk-based, Regression, State-model based and more are briefly explained
  • Exploratory testing in detail and practice
Bug reporting
  • How to increase the probability the bug will be taken seriously
  • What should we report?
  • Influencing others from a cost perspective
Final Thoughts and Tips
  • Basic strategy for dealing with new code
  • What to do when there is no specification?
  • What to do when we “hit the wall”? 

Course Length

1 day

Target audience

Test case designers, test managers, developers, testers, and all others who are interested in learning more about how to improve efficiency in testing by using the right test techniques.

Prerequisites

Preferably ISEB/ISTQB Foundation or similar but not required. Some experience from testing is beneficial.

Course Material

The course material is developed in-house, in English, partially based on Cem Kaner and James Bach learning materials, books and publication