Test objectives
- Brent: A lot of my discussions have come from people working in military. You have objectives, strategies and tactics. The tests and test steps usually relate to tactics. The strategies are the methodologies used to achieve your objectives - the framework for your tests/test steps.
- Wilma Matthews, coauthor of On Deadline: Managing Media Relations. Wilma described a four step strategic planning model:
- Set a goal: the business outcome. What you want your communications to achieve.
- Establish strategies: The broad approaches you are going to take in order to achieve the goal.
- Define objectives for each strategy. Objectives are the measurable tasks that will be undertaken in order to realize the strategies.
- Develop tactics - the tools that will be used in order to achieve the objectives.
- Wilma used the example of World War II in order to illustrate the application of these concepts.
- Goal: Win the war.
- Strategy: Surround Germany to choke off the resources that fueled its military force.
- Objective: Invade France. This is measurable. You’ll know if you’ve succeeded and to what degree.
- Tactics: What will you use to do this? e.g. ships, planes, soldiers, etc.
Identifying equivalence classes http://web-cat.cs.vt.edu/CsEdWiki/BehavioralTestingModule/EquivalencePartioning
- "get to know" their applications, "live" mind-map demo to create test objectives for a feature
- Or just take pictures of some of my mind maps
- Good examples:
- Test that the data warehouse is able to handle multiple parallel connection threads.
- Verify the ability of the application to accept input from various input methods, regardless of other locale settings.
- Bad examples
- Attributes of good test objectives (fragrances)/bad test objectives (smells)