Modeling
contributed by: Helena Jeret-Mäe, Joep Schuurkes
Briefing
Modeling software under test helps to analyze it, learn about it from different angles to be able to find useful test ideas. Depending on the kind of model you’re building and on your personal preferences you can pick an appropriate format, e.g. a list, a mindmap or a diagram.
Touring explained
One way to explore different perspectives on an application is touring. Like you can tour a city looking for different things (museums, night clubs or theaters), you can also tour an application looking for different kinds of things.
Michael Kelly came up with the following list of possible tours: FCC CUTS VIDS. Take a look at the list. It’s ok if you don’t fully understand all of them. For now we want to focus on the Configuration tour, User tour and the Data tour.
- Feature tour : Move through the application and get familiar with all the controls and features you come across.
- Complexity tour : Find the five most complex things about the application.
- Claims tour : Find all the information in the product that tells you what the product does.
- Configuration tour : Attempt to find all the ways you can change settings in the product in a way that the application retains those settings.
- User tour : Imagine five users for the product and the information they would want from the product or the major features they would be interested in.
- Testability tour : Find all the features you can use as testability features and/or identify tools you have available that you can use to help in your testing.
- Scenario tour : Imagine five realistic scenarios for how the users identified in the user tour would use this product.
- Variability tour : Look for things you can change in the application - and then you try to change them.
- Interoperability tour : What does this application interact with?
- Data tour : Identify the major data elements of the application.
- Structure tour : Find everything you can about what comprises the physical product code, interfaces, hardware, files, etc…).
Exercise
Apply the following tours to Google Calendar. Take 5 minutes for each tour.
- User tour (instead of five users, do this for one: yourself)
- Data tour
- Configuration tour
Evaluation
- For each tour write down 3 things you would want to test.
- How did these tours help you to come up with different test ideas?