Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This testing approach seems relatively straightforward and somewhat intuitive.
Be aware that the authors have seen more companies skip restore testing than per-
form restore testing. For some unexplained reason, these companies concentrate on
validating the backup schedule and procedures, never trying to restore business from
those backups. More often than not, when the untested but now business-critical
restore process is used for the fi rst time on real data, the attempt will fail for a variety
of preventable reasons. For example, the backup fi les are empty or the backup fi le
rotation is erroneous, causing you to write over the backup fi les last weekend that
you so desperately need now. It is truly a career-altering experience.
8.8 PUTTING STRUCTURAL TESTING
IN PERSPECTIVE
The obvious focus of test planning for software is the application or system under
development. A less obvious but just as important focus is the software that supports
the new application. Although the support software cannot compensate for a poor
application implementation, it can detract from a good application implementation.
The motivation to plan and execute structural tests is to validate this software ap-
plication enabler.
8.9 SUMMARY
The objective of structural testing is to validate the behavior of software that sup-
ports the software the user touches. This collective support software is often called
the software platform. The software platform purpose is basically different from
the application software. The software platform is not written for one specifi c busi-
ness application. Conversely, a software platform is written as a generic capability
that can support many different kinds of business applications at the same time.
Therefore, software platforms are a possible point of failure when a newly developed
software is run. The risk of software platform failure is reduced by structural testing
techniques.
Because most software platform components come prepackaged (no source
code available), the white box techniques cannot be applied to the software platform.
Because the software platform behavior is seldom observed directly by the end user,
most of the black box testing techniques except intuition and experience cannot be
applied to the software platform as well. This is an area of testing that relies on the
tester's own experience of some kind as a system administrator role or the tester's
collaboration with system administrators. Structural testing techniques include the
following:
1.
2.
interface testing
security testing
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