3 Technical Testing Books to improve your test tech skills

Introduction

In my career, I always believed that we (technical roles working in a software development project) are software engineers with more focus and experience in one area (backend, frontend, quality engineering, devops).

These 3 books can be read by any software engineer that want’s to learn more about the quality engineering topic.

The first book will show to you a more in-depth technical perspective of quality. The second focuses on the web and the third focuses on API.

Developer Testing: Building Quality Into Software

by Alexander Tarnowski

One of my favorite books related to Quality Engineering.
Alexander explains very well all about testing to tester and developers. There’re some chapters with a good explanation about testing without code, and there some chapters with a lot of code explaining testability and how to apply some testing ideas in code.

If you are a backend developer or an experienced quality engineer you’ll understand a lot of concepts and practices to expand your knowledge and create reliable software.

Reviews on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27781314-developer-testing

Find on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Developer-Testing-Building-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/0134291069

The Way of the Web Tester: Reduce Bugs, Increase Quality, Have Fun

by Jonathan Rasmusson

Are you a newbie or experienced web tester? It doesn’t matter: you must read this book.

Jonathan guides his explanation on the automation pyramid in an upside-down way, and I believe he is right. For testers, it is faster learning because they are used to working in the UI layer. But the author also explains really well the other layers in detail with practical examples.

It’s a must-read book for developers working in an agile team because the author shows, with some practical programming exercises, how we do unit tests with mocks.

My tip: read slowly and try to do all exercises.

Reviews on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29584679-the-way-of-the-web-tester

Find on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Way-Web-Tester-Beginners-Automating-ebook/dp/B01MF92GTC/

Automating and Testing a REST API

by Alan Richardson

Alan has a super high knowledge of Selenium WebDriver (and an excellent course about it as well) and is the author of Java for Testers book.

In my opinion, you must have previous knowledge in test REST APIs (even the author explains it).

I’ve learned new interesting things, like hack the HTTP request to create data (Fuzzer). All API examples are using the XML approach. I missed examples with JSON but it’s positive: we have a lot of examples using JSON on the internet.

I also liked the chapter about API abstractions. It’s a really good thing to think that your tool can be replaced with another, so the abstraction makes this transition easier and your tests readable.

Reviews on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33831267-automating-and-testing-a-rest-api

Find on Leanpub: https://leanpub.com/testrestapi

How about you?

Which technical test book do you recommend to read?