Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Specification based testing - Second of my approaches to testing

                “Bug prevention is testing’s first goal.” – B. Beizer

One of the best practices in our team is the fact that both the devs and the tests  review the functional specification before it is accepted. As a test this is the time to make them most of. One of the practices I have learnt from Robert Binders, Testing Object Oriented Systems is analyzing the requirements while you read them. He recommends a pattern called Extended use-cases. If you rewrite the requirements in this way, trying to fill in different scenarios/inputs, you can detect ambiguities in the functional specification better than if you just read through the specification.
The functional specification is the basis for the system tests. Because you can start work on these as soon as the functional specification is out, you have your system test strategy ready even before the developers start churning out features. While you use the system tests the last, you write them the first. As features become available, you can start running some of them.

2 comments:

  1. I think before all these kinds of testing comes one more, which I call documentation testing. Install the product open the documentation and see if the product does what the documentation says it does. You will find a ton of bugs. Customer pain starts from there.

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  2. so not able to work as developer, thats why u choose testing and know misguiding other people by writing such blogs.
    Its better to write some real and good stuff and not the only theoritical part

    Hope u understand wat i mean

    Just for your Knowledge

    Specification based testing is completely different from Functional specification testing,
    or watever u r calling it

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