Learning Outcomes

Course delegates will complete the course having gained confidence in developing systems that they know meet the need of modern security standards.

• Appreciate the multiple dimensions of testing
• Learn the fundamentals of modern testing methods
• Be able to use a variety of testing frameworks
• Build a solid foundation for becoming a coder and tester

Course Outline

Designed to reflect the realities of modern software development - including working in small cross functional teams, deploying to the cloud and supporting a diverse range of users. Both functional and non-functional testing is covered in depth, as are emerging methods like property and mutation testing.

Modules

Delegates will complete training in the following modules.

1. Introduction to Testing

• The evolution of the testers role
• Developing the mindset for testing
• Escalating costs when discovering bugs
• The pyramid view of different kinds of test
• Functional vs. non-functional testing
• Black vs. white vs. grey test modalities
• Why automation is essential but limited
• Do testers also need to be coders?
• Can coders ever be good testers?

2. The Agile Perspective on Testers

• It's not about breaking things
• Making a positive impact on quality
• Testing is everyones responsibility
• The concept of the 'T' shaped engineer
• Facilitating rather than gatekeeping
• Motivating rather than demoralizing
• Advantages of 'pair testing' with coders
• Using Acceptance Test Driven Development
• The need to address 'escape defects'
• Different forms of technical debt
• Focusing on the bugs that matter
• Embedding testing into workflows

3. Core Concepts of Functional Testing

• Picking test cases via Equivalence Partitioning
• Using Boundary Value Analysis to find edge cases
• Discovering core test cases using Decision Tables
• Deriving test cases from State Transition Diagrams
• Extracting tests from scenarios in Use Case Reports
• Statement and decision coverge in White Box Testing

4. Automating Test Cases

• Do you really care if it fails?
• Decoupling the UI to facilitiate testing
• Readability is everything in testing code
• Coding principles that don't translate
• Using Gherkin as a universal language
• Partitioning tests to remove coupling
• Isolating tests for parallel execution
• Creating an efficient CI/CD pipeline

5. Testing for Usability

• It is not possible to automate empathy
• Why we need to perform Exploratory Testing
• How to target an Exploratory Testing Session
• Taxi cab testing vs. testing single features
• Organising exploratory test sessions
• Writing a Test Charter for the event
• Picking a team and assigning key roles
• Ways to ensure effective reporting

6. Accessibility and i18N Testing

• Most software has poor accessibility
• Issues faced by visually impaired users
• Motivations to ensure apps are accessible
• Extra issues due to Internationalization
• Defining test cases to prove accessibility
• Screen Readers on browsers and mobile devices
• Using Pa11y to highlight accessibility blackspots
• Using specialist testers to verify accessibility

7. Property Based Testing

• Why PBT eveolved within the FP community
• Characteristics of pure functions within FP
• Generalizing test cases into properties
• Creating generators and shrinking rules
• Performing PBT on the JVM with ScalaCheck
• Performing PBT in the CLR with FsCheck
• Performing PBT in Python with Hypothesis

8. Mutation Testing

• How altering your code validates your tests
• Why mutation tells you more than code coverage
• Comparing Property Based and Mutation Testing
• Types of changes that create mutant programs
• Measuring how well your tests find mutants
• Performing mutations in Python with Cosmic Ray
• Mutation tools available for the JVM and CLR

9. Performance and Stress Testing

• Common myths surrounding performance testing
• Does your test environment replicate production?
• Defining what peformance means within your system
• Crafting appropriate and realistic benchmarks
• Using JMeter for performance / stress testing
• Using Gattling for continuous load testing
• Abstracting Gattling and JMeter via Taurus
• Running distributed load tests via Locust

10. Tools for Testing Distributed Systems

• Simplifying your setup using Docker
• Automating the browser via Selenium
• Exploring RESTful APIs using Postman
• Using Neuman to integrate Postman into CI
• Mocking RESTful servcies with WireMock
• Isolating REST Controllers in Spring Boot
• Isolating Components in Angular and React
• Using REST-assured to simplify complex tests
• Test libraries specific to reactive streams
• Integrating the above libraries with Cucumber
• Testing serverless applications in AWS Lambda

11. Contract Testing and Distributed Systems

• Contracts between providers and suppliers
• Defining contracts as sets of interactions
• Avoiding contracts turning into functional tests
• Using the Pact tool to perform contract testing
• Automating Pact tests using the Broker utility

12. Resiliency Testing

• The need to ensure continuous quality of service
• High availability and the 'five nines' guarantee
• Using Goblin for resiliency testing in cloud apps
• Chaos engineering at Netflix and the Simian Army
• Ensuring resiliance objectives are clearly defined
• Distinguishing between SLAs, SLOs and SLIs

Prerequisites

The course can be tailored to any modern OO language (Java, C# etc) but the delegates should come armed with a good understanding of writing code in a high-level language such as Java, TypeScript, Kotlin, C#, etc. Delegates should also have a firm understanding of Engineering Principles.

Further Learning

Looking to continue on your learning path? The following courses are ideal as follow-on courses to Modern Testing.