Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing

2.13. Test Development

In some cases, I find my test teams rerunning tests that were created in previous test efforts. In other cases, I've used a purely exploratory approach where I created the test data during testing and followed my muse in terms of procedures and specific test steps. Typically, though, my test projects include some amount of work to design and develop various test objects such as test cases, test tools, test procedures, test suites, automated test scripts, and so forth. Collectively, I refer to these objects as test systems.

In such cases, in this section, I'll describe how my test team will create each of those objects. (I'll look at some particulars of testware development in Chapter 3.) If we're going to use manual testing, then I'll let the readers know if we intend to write detailed test cases or use test charters.^[] If I need test data, then I'll explain how we're getting that data and why we picked those approaches. If we're doing test automation using existing (commercial or freeware) test tools, then I'll describe why we're using the particular tools we've chosen and how we intend to develop test scripts. If we're creating custom test tools or utilities, then I'll describe what those utilities are and how we intend to use them.

^[] Test charters are something I learned from James Bach in the context of his approach for exploratory testing. See his material on exploratory testing at www.satisfice.com.

At some point, test system or testware development ...