The Domain Testing Workbook is available

Cem Kaner, Sowmya Padmanabhan and Doug Hoffman have a new book called The Domain Testing Workbook. I’d highly recommend picking up a copy or at least adding it to your reading list! This book is not just a deep dive into one test technique but it represents a collective thinking about what software testing is today.

Domain Testing

BBST Test Design was my formal introduction to Domain Testing aka boundary and equivalence class analysis. Domain Testing is often cited as the most popular (or one of the most popular) test techniques in use today. For its part the Test Design course spends a whole week, a full lecture series and at least one assignment introducing and practicing this technique. If you’d like an introduction I recommend the first lecture from the fifth week in the Test Design series in which Cem introduces Domain Testing:

(For more information see the Testing Education Website or YouTube.)

I got the chance to do some reviewing of the workbook and enjoyed how it elaborated on the material I was learning Test Design. Yet it went further by offering layers of detailed examples to work through and is set up to allow the reader to skip around to whatever section or chapter they find interesting.

In an email, Cem described the book:

My impression is that no author has explored their full process for using domain testing. They stop after describing what they see as the most important points. So everyone describes a different part of the elephant and we see a collection of incomplete and often contradictory analyses. Sowmya, Doug and I are trying to describe the whole elephant. (We aren’t describing The One True Elephant of Domain Testing, just the one WE ride when we hunt domain bugs.) That makes it possible for us to solve many types of problems using one coherent mental structure.

Cem Kaner

I’m excited for this book to be turned into a class on domain testing ( and hopefully open sourced) with the rest of BBST. In the meantime pick up the book from Amazon and let me know what you think!