Explore It!

Practice Sessions

Try modeling an area of the system you’re testing. You might focus on a low-level interaction where you have to pay close attention to tiny details, as demonstrated with the login example (Figure 2, ​The login user interface​). Or you might try modeling states for something larger and at a higher level of abstraction.

Having chosen your target, explore it to discover states and events. Start with user actions: poke at buttons, change data, move things around. As you do, watch for transitory states and the conditions that trigger their transitions. Create a map of the state model.

With your model in hand, use it to suggest ...