Full Stack Testing, 2nd Edition

Foreword to the Second Edition

The world seems to have gone a bit crazy. I don’t mean in the geopolitical sense (although there is a big case for that), I mean in the context of software delivery. The emergence of AI-assisted coding tools has created opportunity, confusion, angst, and uncertainty.

Against that backdrop, being able to be more confident about what we are doing is very important. In the rough seas of our industry, we need some calm islands to which to cling while the storm rages around us. So whilst we introduce more nondeterminism into our lives through LLMs, it becomes even more important to make sure that we are testing our systems effectively.

This book seamlessly blends successful ideas from the recent past, such as the testing approaches pioneered as part of Agile software delivery methods, with the new realities of today. The fact that this means that concepts such as “three amigos” get reintroduced to a new audience is incredibly satisfying to someone like me, who is showing more than a few grey hairs these days. At the same time, I learned a huge amount from reading this book. I’m incredibly pleased that its focus goes well beyond automated functional testing to be “full-stack” in many senses of the word.

Covering a breadth of skills, as befits the title, you’ll find here coverage of everything from manual testing to security testing, performance testing to tuning your CI test suites. Across all of this is the notion of testing as being a continual practice, ...