Testing Strategy - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 70

buying more disk storage. Failing to fi nd an adequate “quick fi x,” the developers are forced
back to the drawing board for some expensive design changes and retesting.
Performance testing is also referred to as “load” testing because the best way
to do performance testing is when you exert a load (many transactions) on the sys-
tem like it will have in production. We will examine this black box technique in a
subsequent chapter. You just need a general appreciation now for what performance
testing is in order to do your test planning.

4.3 THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL TESTING STRATEGY
CHESS BOARD

Now we have four chess pieces (static testing, white box testing, black box testing,
and performance testing) that we can use to plan our winning moves. What does
the chess board look like ? Figure 4.1 shows you the empty test planning “chess
board” as a starting point. Figure 4.1 is Table 2.1 development stages for columns by
software layers to be tested for rows.
The software testing techniques (chess board “pieces”) we just discussed and
their icons are shown in the upper right legend and are placed on appropriate squares
in the chess board.

Software testing

Static White

Performance

Black
X Too late to

Software

Application

Connectivity
(private,

Data resources
(data

Security
(access,

Operating
system

Preliminary
investigation

Preliminary
construction

Final
construction

Ship
or

Post-
implement

+ Analysis

Phased development

Figure 4.1 The testing strategy chess board