Software testing book recommendations

June 22, 2006 4:45 AM

I'm looking for a good book or books on software testing and test development.

I've been working as a software tester and/or test developer for eight years now but I still feel like I don't quite know what I'm doing. Can anyone recommend a good book or books for designing tests? Amazon lists 492 books on the subject but I didn't want to just start buying blindly.

The product that I test is a distributed file system/high-speed storage system so this is all scripted non-gui testing. Mostly my issue is that the tests that I develop and run don't seem to do a very good job of actually finding bugs in the product. I have no problems writing base cases but don't do very well in coming up with interesting corner cases that are more likely to break the product.

posted by octothorpe to computers & internet (4 comments total)

The Pragmatic Programmer is a good basic guide, but you might be looking for something more in-depth.
posted by lunchbox at 6:25 AM on June 22, 2006

A reallly good place to start is to read the archive of Joel Spolsky's blog. Lots and lots of really key insights about software development from a guy who really does know his stuff.

His books are worthwhile, too.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:31 AM on June 22, 2006

Those aren't in depth testing books. cotothorpe would get more from thumbing through the references on the wikipedia page for software testing or searching comp.software.testing for book recommendations (that looks like a good thread).
posted by bleary at 5:33 PM on June 22, 2006

Look into model based testing methods. Testing Object Oriented Systems covers that and more (it's one of the books listed off the wiki page). (disclaimer: I used to work for the author)
posted by bleary at 5:46 PM on June 22, 2006