TL;DR

In this post, you will find out who is a test engineer and which basic test activities he or she performs. We will introduce you to software testing based on the remarkable book,  Introduction To Software Testing by Paul Ammann and Jeff Offutt.

A test engineer is an Information Technology professional who does following essential testing activities:

• design test inputs
• design test cases
• conducting testing activity
• analyzing test result
• report results to someone

Today there is the dogma that test cases are obsolete, but that comes from the people who do not understand that every testing activity needs preparation. And that preparation should be captured in the test case. For example, the Charter is a form of a test case in exploratory testing. Without a test case, you are doing inadequate testing.

Each software artifact should have a corresponding set of test activities. For some of those software artifacts, the most suitable person to do testing activities is the creator of this software artifact. The best example is code, where software developer does unit and component testing, usually supported, but not necessary, with test code.

Test manager activities are:

• test process
• test policies
• help test engineers
• communicate with other managers

Formal Coverage Criteria

Formal coverage criteria help testers to design test inputs to exercise program known and unknown features. Doing that, there is a high probability that program problems would be discovered before actual users. The second value of formal coverage criteria is to help testers determine when they did ENOUGH testing, well-known stopping rules (this is a mandatory question on all software tester’s hiring interview).

In the next post, we will discuss the testing activity categorization.