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Trends in software testing
Mohanty H., Mohanty J., Balakrishnan A., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 176 pp. Type: Book
Date Reviewed: Jun 23 2017

Testing is an interesting subject; perhaps more so than any software engineering subject, how the authors (editors) of a book treat it is heavily dependent on the academe/practitioner focus of those who put the book together.

The editors of this book (it is taken from a set of papers at a conference in India) have done a pretty fair job of achieving a balance between academe and practice. They themselves are a fair representation of both fields, and the authors whose works they have chosen are spread between four emerging from practice and three from academe (annoyingly, they assert the three academe choices are to provide “rigor”!). It is interesting that none of the editors has chosen testing as a prime research focus, but nevertheless this collection of papers is worthwhile given the importance of testing in the software engineering field.

One last comment on the editors and authors: they are all from India. Given the growing importance of India in the field of software engineering, this is for the most part not a problem. However, there is a tendency among Indian authors to leave out key articles in English sentences, and that is certainly evident in this book. It diminishes readability, but in no way diminishes understanding. Still, one would have thought the publishers would have corrected that: it is a clerical error, after all.

Now, for the book itself. The book has citations following each chosen contribution, but there aren’t any for the overall book and, more to the point, there is no glossary or index for the book. That becomes a problem when, for example, one of the authors uses the term “asserts” and there is no way to learn what he means by that.

The book on occasion advocates various things, such as pair programming of test cases and the “10-minute build,” without much justification for those choices. Also, it narrows its discussion of agile approaches to scrum and XP (has the battle over the various agile approaches already been fought and won?!). It sometimes provides some barely credible comparisons for contrasting approaches, such as saying that spiral testing can take months while going on to claim that similar agile testing takes two to three weeks!

On the positive side, the book provides some good case studies of the concepts being described. On the negative side, there are too many obscure passages that are hard at best to understand: a chapter on “uncertainty,” which seemed to contain valid material but was hard to understand and apply; a chapter on “separation logic,” which seemed, mysteriously, more about pointers than anything else; and a chapter on enterprise software systems that contained a sentence so obscure (and one with which I disagreed on so many levels) that I gave up on the chapter (“The engineering of enterprise software systems suffers from an inherent lack of creativity and innovation and is often left to user-centric incremental changes that are not often disruptive enough for business needs.”). In my own opinion, enterprise systems are examples of software engineering at its finest because they implement a massive and complex collection of business needs in a company-independent way.

There is a final chapter on testing as a service that is interesting, but fails to mention the problem of doing that when testing is integrated with the development process, as many modern-day test experts advise.

Bottom line? The book is interesting, but I’m not sure I found it valuable enough to add to a tester’s own library.

Reviewer:  R. L. Glass Review #: CR145374 (1709-0577)
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