How Google Tests Software

James A. Whittaker · Jason Arbon · Jeff Carollo

Mar 2012 · Addison-Wesley

About this ebook

2012 Jolt Award finalist!

Pioneering the Future of Software Test

Do you need to get it right, too? Then, learn from Google. Legendary testing expert James Whittaker, until recently a Google testing leader, and two top Google experts reveal exactly how Google tests software, offering brand-new best practices you can use even if you’re not quite Google’s size...yet!

Breakthrough Techniques You Can Actually Use

Discover 100% practical, amazingly scalable techniques for analyzing risk and planning tests...thinking like real users...implementing exploratory, black box, white box, and acceptance testing...getting usable feedback...tracking issues...choosing and creating tools...testing “Docs & Mocks,” interfaces, classes, modules, libraries, binaries, services, and infrastructure...reviewing code and refactoring...using test hooks, presubmit scripts, queues, continuous builds, and more. With these techniques, you can transform testing from a bottleneck into an accelerator–and make your whole organization more productive!

Ratings and reviews

If you're in the business of software testing, this is certainly an interesting read. There are many neat details here about Google's approach to many aspects of testing and quality assurance in a web application's development lifecycle. I particularly learned a great deal from the discussion of build and test dependency modeling. IMO, the book would flow much better if organized by testing activities or tools instead of overlapping job descriptions. Also, the writing focuses on several tools which are "planned for open-source release" but are still not available (though some are available now). Parts of the book are written as if to solely promote the tools, but you can usually see through that to the underlying need.I got the feeling that the chapters were written by different authors, with different writing styles and competency that make the book struggle to "flow" end-to-end. Chapters 3 and 4 in particular have grammatical issues and ramble a bit. At least one bullet list appears out of nowhere, with no context at all. It's interesting that this book was published shortly after Whittaker left for MS. Any chance it was rushed to the publisher?

I downloaded a sample of this book on my phone a few months ago and it allowed Read Aloud so I bought it. Now I bought a large tablet and downloaded book and Read Aloud has been disabled. This means all of us with poor eyesight can't read this book! Even with voice assist it doesn't work. Please enable Read Aloud!

Come on, you cannot continue with old paper book prices when costs of publishing and distribution are a lot of lower.

About the author

James Whittaker is an engineering director at Google and has been responsible for testing Chrome, maps, and Google web apps. He used to work for Microsoft and was a professor before that. James is one of the best-known names in testing the world over.

Jason Arbon is a test engineer at Google and has been responsible for testing Google Desktop, Chrome, and Chrome OS. He also served as development lead for an array of open-source test tools and personalization experiments. He worked at Microsoft prior to joining Google.

Jeff Carollo is a software engineer in test at Google and has been responsible for testing Google Voice, Toolbar, Chrome, and Chrome OS. He has consulted with dozens of internal Google development teams helping them improve initial code quality. He converted to a software engineer in 2010 and leads development of Google+ APIs. He also worked at Microsoft prior to joining Google."