Advanced Software Testing – Vol. 1, 2nd Edition

Hardware error: The software is correct, but the hardware is failing, whether consistently or intermittently. Personally, I’m always skeptical when a programmer says that a failure is a hardware problem.

A checklist is a mental aid, not a substitute for thought.

Have we stayed in the proper realm of requirements, not design? In other words, are all requirements actually requirements and not design or implementation solutions?

Examples: Wiegers’s Review Checklists

On Agile projects, the usual way of capturing a requirement is what is called a user story. A typical user story has the form of, “As an x, I want the system to do y, so that I can accomplish z.” For example, “As a customer, I want the system to provide a transaction history screen, so that I can review my previous invoices.”

User stories are generally finer grained, smaller than use cases. However, a use case might be composed from multiple user stories. A collection of logically related and sometimes interdependent user stories is also referred to as an epic.

Accessibility must be designed into the system. Trying to retrofit a user interface to be accessible after it is built is unlikely to work.

Functional testing focuses on what the system does, rather than how it does it. Non-functional testing is focused on how the system does what it does. Both functional and non-functional testing are black-box tests, being focused on behavior. White-box tests are focused on how the system works internally—i.e., on its structure.

Impatient customer: Types quickly, makes many mistakes, has very short think time, hits Next button multiple times

Nervous customer: Uses Back button a lot, revises entries, has long think time
▪Novice Internet user: Makes a lot of data input mistakes, has long think time
▪Power user: Types quickly, makes few mistakes, uses copy and paste from other PC applications (e.g., account numbers), has very short think time

The category of code applies to some simple typo, misspelling, stylistic error, or other coding error that results in a failure. Theoretically, these couldn’t get past a compiler, but, in these days of scripting on browsers, this stuff does happen.