Preface

The area of Software Testing has acquired wider horizon and significance. Customers demand defect-free products; regulatory authorities go into the nitty-gritties of the tests to which a piece of software is subjected, just as pharmaceutical companies are mandated to declare how they test the medicines before release. Most of the books available in the market cover theoretical aspects but very few address practical aspects. To prepare students for a career in testing and to be of value to practitioners, one needs to provide a pragmatic and practical view of testing, together with the right balance of people, process and technology. This forms the basis of the book Software Testing—Principles and Practices.

As the title indicates, the emphasis is on principles and practices. The material in this book has already been “Beta tested” by several universities in India such as Anna University in Chennai and International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (iiit-b). iiit-b is also adopting the book for its Center of Excellence in Software Engineering and for its M. Tech students. Some concepts in the book have already been presented to practitioners through international conferences and guest lectures by the authors of this book.

We have added chapters that focus on managing geographically distributed teams. This is especially relevant for multinational companies, where distributed teams in different continents work together in unison—developing, testing and delivering products to a global customer base. We have included emerging trends in testing like extreme testing, ad hoc testing and so on.

The contents of this book can be used by practitioners to understand the state-of-practice in the testing industry. The chapters on Metrics and Measurements, Test Planning, Test Management and Automation have been added to help the practitioners adopt these concepts at work. We have provided sufficient academic rigor to satisfy the contents of the syllabi of the various universities.

We would like to thank Ms. Gayathri Chandrasekar, Test manager at eFunds, Chennai for her contributions to some of the chapters in the book.

Srinivasan Desikan
Gopalaswamy Ramesh