Pragmatic Software Testing covers the strategies, techniques, and concepts that effective and efficient test professionals need to do their job. This book is about practical concepts. This book is hands-on with many realistic exercises. Appropriately enough, this book is tested. Rex Black has used these concepts in his career as a test professional, which began in 1987, four years after starting his software career in a Fortran and C programming job. Since 1997, thousands of software and systems professionals around the world have taken the training courses that provide the base material for this book.

The first section discusses the goals, strategies, and tactics of effective and efficient testing. Even experienced testers will find something new here, and people who are new to testing should work through these chapters completely.

The next section lays the foundation of Rex Black's technique for risk-based testing. You’ll learn how to analyze, prioritize, and document risks to the quality of the system, using both informal and formal techniques. Unless you are already an experienced risk-analysis professional, you should work carefully through this section.

In the heart of the book, with the goals of testing defined through quality risk analysis, you’ll start to fill your testing toolkit. In a sequence of sections, you’ll learn to design, develop, and, ultimately, document various kinds of tests. You’ll learn static, black box, and white box test techniques, including:

* Requirements, design, and code reviews.
* Equivalence classes and boundary value analysis.
* Decision tables.
* Live data and customer workflowtesting.
* State-transition diagrams.
* Domain testing.
* Orthogonal arrays.
* Statement, branch, condition, and loop code coverage.
* McCabe complexity and unit basis tests.
* Data flow coverage.
* Integration test techniques.
* McCabe integration basis tests.