Re: Test Scripts/ Test Specifications

["Dana Ditomaso" <dana -at- danasolutions -dot- com>]

John Fleming asked:
> Has anybody in this list serve done similar projects? And do you have any
> suggestions, tips, or warnings?  What things worked well.  What things
would
> you do differently.  What problems could be avoided and what would you do
to
> avoid them?

This may not be quite the response that you're looking for, but...

The most important thing to keep in mind when writing test scripts is that
you don't want to test it to see if it's working - you want to test it to
see if you can break it. Test scripts are good and necessary, and will prove
that certain pieces of functionality exist, but they won't tell you if your
sofware is really working. Test scripts assume a certain starting point and
a certain end point, with user actions in between. Regardless of how
complete you think your scenarios are, someone will do something different
and make the software break, usually in a rather spectacular manner.

I'm assuming that these scripts will be used to test the software at some
point in time? If so, you need to make sure that you CYA by including
scenarios that seem odd, but could conceivably happen. At the same time, you
don't want to spend more time writing scenarios than actually testing.

A good site that has a number of links about software testing is:
http://www.testinghotlist.com/

I won't go on any further about this, as it's not quite relevant to tech
writing, but feel free to contact me off-list (not just John, anyone else
who is interested as well), and I can tell you about how I had to get our QA
department actually finding bugs before they happen, instead of happily
following test scripts that always worked.

Dana


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