2012 Jolt Award finalist!

Pioneering the Future of Software Test

Do you need to get it right, too? Then, learn from Google. Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you’re not quite Google’s size…yet!

Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use

Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests…thinking like real users…implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing…getting usable feedback…tracking issues…choosing and creating tools…testing “Docs & Mocks,” interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure…reviewing code and refactoring…using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator–and make your whole organization more productive!

How to Find and Fix the Killer Software Bugs that Evade Conventional Testing

In Exploratory Software Testing, renowned software testing expert James Whittaker reveals the real causes of today’s most serious, well-hidden software bugs--and introduces powerful new “exploratory” techniques for finding and correcting them.

Drawing on nearly two decades of experience working at the cutting edge of testing with Google, Microsoft, and other top software organizations, Whittaker introduces innovative new processes for manual testing that are repeatable, prescriptive, teachable, and extremely effective. Whittaker defines both in-the-small techniques for individual testers and in-the-large techniques to supercharge test teams. He also introduces a hybrid strategy for injecting exploratory concepts into traditional scripted testing. You’ll learn when to use each, and how to use them all successfully.

Concise, entertaining, and actionable, this book introduces robust techniques that have been used extensively by real testers on shipping software, illuminating their actual experiences with these techniques, and the results they’ve achieved. Writing for testers, QA specialists, developers, program managers, and architects alike, Whittaker answers crucial questions such as:

•  Why do some bugs remain invisible to automated testing--and how can I uncover them?

•  What techniques will help me consistently discover and eliminate “show stopper” bugs?

•  How do I make manual testing more effective--and less boring and unpleasant?

•  What’s the most effective high-level test strategy for each project?

•  Which inputs should I test when I can’t test them all?

•  Which test cases will provide the best feature coverage?

•  How can I get better results by combining exploratory testing with traditional script or scenario-based testing?

•  How do I reflect feedback from the development process, such as code changes?

Rigorously test and improve the security of all your Web software!

It’s as certain as death and taxes: hackers will mercilessly attack your Web sites, applications, and services. If you’re vulnerable, you’d better discover these attacks yourself, before the black hats do. Now, there’s a definitive, hands-on guide to security-testing any Web-based software: How to Break Web Software.

In this book, two renowned experts address every category of Web software exploit: attacks on clients, servers, state, user inputs, and more. You’ll master powerful attack tools and techniques as you uncover dozens of crucial, widely exploited flaws in Web architecture and coding. The authors reveal where to look for potential threats and attack vectors, how to rigorously test for each of them, and how to mitigate the problems you find. Coverage includes

·   Client vulnerabilities, including attacks on client-side validation

·   State-based attacks: hidden fields, CGI parameters, cookie poisoning, URL jumping, and session hijacking

·   Attacks on user-supplied inputs: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and directory traversal

·   Language- and technology-based attacks: buffer overflows, canonicalization, and NULL string attacks

·   Server attacks: SQL Injection with stored procedures, command injection, and server fingerprinting

·   Cryptography, privacy, and attacks on Web services

Your Web software is mission-critical–it can’t be compromised. Whether you’re a developer, tester, QA specialist, or IT manager, this book will help you protect that software–systematically.