The Little Black Book On Test Design

At the TPN last week Michael Bolton mentioned a book that he had found very good. It is called The Little Black Book On Test Design and is available for free. It is a book on test design written by Rickard Edgren. It is only 32 pages including cover, contents, bibliography etc so is a short quick read.

I found it very interesting and have plenty of thoughts to take away from it. One of my main takeaways from our is how much we focus on verifying/checking the requirements rather than engaging our minds and actually testing the application. Along with rigidity of how we write test cases and then almost follow them blindly rather than thinking about the test ideas and after each test reevaluating our position. Some questions to think about are:

• Has the information from your last test given you new test ideas?
• Had the information you have just learnt mean that some of your other test ideas will no longer give you additional information about the system under test, so is there value in still running it?
• Is the test going to give someone value
• The test ideas should be ever evolving and not just stay static.

To help you think of test ideas that are more than just the requirements, in the requirements document, which are just the explicit requirements there is a large list of questions/prompts to get the ball rolling included in the book.