Software Testing Objectives and Principles

Test Objective Identification

• Verifying the test basis early during test design achieves the objective of evaluating work products.
• Dynamic testing primarily achieves objectives like gaining confidence, finding defects, and informing decision-making.

Whole Team Approach Benefits

• Agile teams use the Whole Team approach, where members apply skills to assist the team.
• Testers might help developers with code and developers might aid testers in testing, regardless of roles.

Root Cause, Error, Defect, and Failure

• A developer's mistake causes a defect which may be seen as a failure during dynamic testing.
• A developer's mistake/error leads to a defect/fault/bug, causing a failure when the code is dynamically tested or executed.

Testing Principles

• Avoiding tests wearing out is important, as running the same tests repeatedly reduces the chance of finding new failures.
• Repeated tests become less effective over time.

Test Activities and Tasks

• Test control occurs throughout a project to ensure it stays on track, using monitoring information to determine necessary actions.
• Test monitoring compares planned test progress to actual test progress.

Context Impact on Test Process

• In time- and budget-constrained projects, use exploratory and checklist testing to spend less time on test case development.
• These techniques adjust to the project context, requiring less documentation and allowing quicker test execution.

Independence of Testing

• A developer testing their own code could risk the fact the developers are not objective about their own code.
• Testers and developers think differently, allowing testers to be more objective because they are not invested in the code.

Good Testing Practices

• Reviewing requirements as soon as a readable draft is available is good testing practice.
• Test design should begin during code design and implementation, not after the code is completed.

Test-First Approaches

• Coding directed by test cases means test-driven development (TDD) is being used.

Test Levels

• Non-functional tests should be executed at all test levels (unit, integration, system, and acceptance).

Maintenance Testing and Triggers

• When decommissioning a system, data migration testing might be required.
• Data migration may involve moving to another system or an archival system.

Development Lifecycle Impact

• In an iterative lifecycle model, every development activity should have a corresponding testing activity.
• It is correct for any lifecycle model.

Shift-Left Approach

• CI/CD incorporates the shift-left concept through continuous testing throughout the pipeline.
• CI/CD starts testing as early as possible, moving it to the left in the timeline.

Review Roles

• In a formal review, the scribe documents all open issues, problems, and points.

Stakeholder Feedback Benefits

• Early and frequent stakeholder feedback ensures the product being developed meets their vision.

Static Testing

• Static analysis can identify defects, like uninitialized variables, that dynamic testing might miss.

Review Process

• Exit a formal review, entry and exit criteria should be defined during the planning stage.
• These criteria should be evaluated at each step to ensure product readiness.

Test Techniques

• Black-box testing uses requirements specifications as a test basis.
• Black-box differs from techniques that use the software structure as a test basis

Branch Testing

• Branch coverage determines the level based on number of branches tested divided by the total number of branches.
• A section of code with a simple IF statement needs two tests for 100% branch coverage.
• Simple IF statement will be composed of IF... then... else.... end if - has two branch outcomes, true and false, which needs at least one test case.

Exploratory Testing

• Experience-based testing can find defects missed by more formal techniques.
• Experience testing fills the gaps left by more formal testing techniques.

Error Guessing

• Error guessing anticipates where developers are likely to make mistakes and creates tests to cover those areas.

User Stories

• Acceptance criteria is the work product created for Confirmation in the 3 C's technique for user story development.

Equivalence Partitioning

• Applying equivalence partitioning to a grading machine would need 8 test cases for minimum test coverage.
• Tests are needed for the invalid low, each valid partition, and the invalid high test coverage

Boundary Value Analysis

• Testing a thermostat requires a minimum set of test temperature values (69, 70, 75, 76) for 100% two-value boundary value analysis coverage.

Decision Table Testing

• Using the decision table technique, 15 test cases are needed to test the condition.

State Transition Testing

• A log in requirement can be tested with one test case to provide 100% state transition coverage

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)

• Prioritize tests based on the ATDD approach: valid scenarios, invalid (overbooked), then non-functional tests.

Testing Metrics

• A metric tracking the number of test cases passed is gathered during execution.
• Test execution metrics are used in reporting.

Test Plan

• Documenting criteria for writing test cases: length and detail, should be in the test plan.
• The test plan should should include the level of detail and structure for the test documentation as criteria for the performance of testing activities.

Testing Quadrants

• Unit or component tests belong in quadrant 1.

Project Risks

• Problems with the development manager rejecting defect reports is an example of a project risk.
• Problems with modules, failed performance, or any interface issues are examples of product risks.

Test Reports

• A Test Summary should explain variances/deviations between the test plan and the actual testing.
• The Test summary report should not explain any information on weekly status reports, defects found/fixed, or the amount of test cases.

Configuration Management

• If code is released for testing without version control, configuration management is missing.
• Configuration management is not performed if code is not being properly versioned or tracked.

Estimation techniques

• Voting should continue until the consensus is reached and that number should be used to assign the points to the story.
• Using Planning Poker to estimate effort for a story requires three votes.

Test case prioritization

• It's is best in cases that address the highest risk tests first in order to provide the developers feedback quickly..

Defect Reports

• A defect only causes a system crash after being invoked an unlikely chain of events.
• Has severity high, defect would have low priority.

Test Tools

• A tool that assists with tracking the result of reviews is an example of a tool that supports static testing.
• It is a tool that would support and track reviews.

Test Automation

• Test execution should be faster with automation than with manual testing.