Not very practical at all

As you might expect from a couple of academic professors this book is full of formal processes that are easy to teach and write exams around but don't scale to the real world.

The book spends 47 pages covering the basics of object oriented design (class, object, inheritance etc) and UML diagrams (class diagrams, state diagrams, sequence diagrams) yet completely ignores basic testing concepts such as white and black box testing. The book also has zero coverage of popular testing tools such as JUnit and NUnit that are making a real difference in test productivity and code quality these days.

I found only two useful ideas in the book, guided inspection and orthogonal array testing. Guided inspection is documented in mind numbing detail but unfortunately the book does such a poor job of explaining orthogonal array testing that I had to go and research it on the web.

Surprisingly for a book that claims to be a practical guide the exercises are largely ambiguous and open-ended essay style questions. The authors provide snippets of a breakout-style game that they use as a running example throughout the book. The exercises could have been so much better if they had included a design and implementation of a simpler application and set practical problems based on that code. If, like me, you learn through doing then you won't get much help from this book.

I doubt I will pick this book up again anytime soon and neither will I be recommending it to any of my friends or coworkers.

Other Reviews

• Not very practical at all
• the usual not practical book
• A wow of testing series.
• De bons trucs pour tester du code orienté objet
• Thorough, wide and deep coverage of O-O testing