design and development

I've been waiting for this book and I must say, where was this book a year ago? I have experienced most of what the author has described and yes, it answers questions that I have had. It gives principle practices to architect a strategy that will fit the needs of the fast paced start up environments as well as moderate environments that have graduated from the start-up mode. The other neat thing is all of the references to resources that this book points out are very helpful for web concepts and considerations.

The gray box testing emphasis and approach described throughout is very useful and points out the need for blending black box and white box testing to make the testing more effective. The chapters also contain helpful resources such as, books, links, and companies. This goes a long way in educating SQA folks eager to learn.

Overall, I would say that this book is an excellent read and will serve as one of few reference books on my desk. It does assume some knowledge of Quality Assurance but it is not so in depth that a newbie could not understand. Covering most of the basics needed for implementing methods that will be effective and efficient for Web related testing; I would say it was worth the wait.

Brian-

Grey box testing is based on a general understanding of a system's architecture and components. This understanding drives test strategy and identifies opportunities to test components in isolation.

The shade of grey can vary from white box testing (full review of source code) to black box testing (no review of source code). You choose what level of information to gather depending on your budget, capabilities and judgment.

This book provides the first detailed approach to grey box testing, focussing on web-based application architectures. These architectures are based on a heavy use of components: application servers, web servers, load balancers, databases and the like. This book describes these components, suggests how they can fail and what you can do to anticipate, trigger, or detect such failures.

This approach is supported by the author's extensive experience testing web-based (and other) applications as president of a software testing company. It is augmented by plenty of good advice on how to communicate test results clearly.

When industry leaders such as Cem Kaner and Bret Pettichord extol the virtues of this book you can be assured that it is great - everything they and other reviewers have said is on target. Moreover, you'd be hard-pressed to walk into the testing area in any company and not see a copy of this book on someone's desk.

That said, instead of this book you should get the second edition, which is a major rewrite, and also expanded in scope to include testing mobile systems. This edition is titled, "Testing Applications on the Web: Test Planning for Mobile and Internet-Based Systems" ISBN 0471201006, and is everything others have said about this first edition - and more!

Even with a better second edition, this book deserves the five stars I gave it because of the influence it has had on the testing profession. Moreoever, this first edition is not out-of-date, and is still a great book if you don't need information about testing mobile web systems at this time (although it's a safe bet you will in the future).