Wed, 26 Mar 2003
Best practices?
A glimpse of
Cem Kaner's upcoming talk at the
Pacific Northwest Software Quality
Conference:
Twenty-plus years ago, we developed a model for the software testing
effort. It involved several "best practices," such as these:
- the purpose of testing is to find bugs;
- the test group works independently of the programming group;
- tests are designed without knowledge of the underlying code;
- automated tests are developed at the user interface level, by non-programmers;
- tests are designed early in development;
- tests are designed to be reused time and time again, as regression tests;
- testers should design the build verification tests, even the ones to be run by programmers;
- testers should assume that the programmers did a light job of testing and so should extensively cover the basics (such as boundary cases for every field);
- the pool of tests should cover every line and branch in the program, or perhaps every basis path;
- manual tests are documented in great procedural detail so that they can be handed down to less experienced or less skilled testers;
- there should be at least one thoroughly documented test for every requirement item or specification item;
- test cases should be based on documented characteristics of the program, for example on the requirements documents or the specifications;
- test cases should be documented independently, ideally stored in a test case management system that describes the proconditions, procedural details, postconditions, and basis (such as trace to requirements) of each individual test case;
- failures should be reported into a bug tracking system;
- the test group can block release if product quality is too low;
- a count of the number of defects missed, or a ratio of defects missed to defects found, is a good measure of the effectiveness of the test group.
Some of these practices were (or should have been seen as) dubious
from the start... they are all far from being universal truths.
He continues:
Testing practices should be changing. No--strike that "should." Practices are changing.
For those who don't pay attention to testing because it's an
intellectual backwater, be aware: there's a
dust-up
in
progress. With luck, and sympathetic attention from "outsiders", things will be better
in five years.
## Posted at 20:20 in category /context_driven_testing
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