Software development involves determining what to develop, documenting this decision, determining how to develop it, and actually developing it.We present a framework for describing this process in terms of layers of activity. Many people use pyramid analogies, which show the magnitude of effort in each layer (lines of code versus lines of requirements, for example). Many other people use inverted pyramids to reflect the importance (or impact) of work done at different layers (a sentance defining a strategy has more impact than a line of code). Some people show PERT diagrams of waterfalls or pretty circular arrows charts showing iterative lifecycles, or any of many good analogies.
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Software requirements specification / Testing
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Where Bugs Come From
In the Foundation series article on software processes we introduce a definition of software process as three steps – (decide, develop, deliver). That article will provide some contextfor this discussion, which dives more deeply into the three steps (decide, develop, deliver).
Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software testing series: A case study
This post is a test automation case study, but at a higher level.
We’ll talk about it in terms of defining the problem, and then discuss the objective (what we proposed to do to solve the problem), the strategy (how we went about doing it) and the tactics (how we executed the strategy). Since this happened in the real world, we’ll also identify the constraints within which we had to operate.
Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Unit Testing of Software
Testing software is more than just manually banging around (also called monkey testing) and trying to break different parts of the software application. Unit testing is testing a subset of the functionality of a piece of software. A unit test is different from a system test in that it provides information only about a particular subset of the software. In our previous Foundation series post on black box and white box testing, we used the inspections that come bundled with an oil change as examples of unit tests.
Communication / Consulting / Lists / Requirements / Requirements gathering / Software development / Software requirements specification
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Top Five Requirements Gathering Tips
Interviewing, Brainstorming, Documenting Use Cases, Prototyping, and Analyzing Documents are our top-five tips. Read more for details
Polls / Requirements / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software Testing Series: Black Box vs White Box Testing
Should I use black box testing or white box testing for my software?
You will hear three answers to this question – black, white, and gray. We recently published a foundation series post on black box and white box testing – which serves as a good background document. We also mention greybox (or gray box) testing as a layered approach to combining both disciplines.
Given those definitions, let’s look at the pros and cons of each style of testing.
Foundation series / Polls / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing
Blackbox tests and whitebox tests.
These terms get thrown about quite a bit. In a previous post, we referenced Marc Clifton’s advanced unit testing series. If you were already familiar with the domain, his article could immediately build on that background knowledge and extend it.
Software testing can be most simply described as “for a given set of inputs into a software application, evaluate a set of outputs.” Software testing is a cause-and-effect analysis.
Software development / Testing
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Software testing series: Introduction
Software testing is a field that is so broad reaching that you can write hundreds of books about – and people have. There are different techniques and different tools. New testing technologies are being created all the time. There are a host of different goals – testing requirements, testing designs, […]
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development
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More on choosing the right software process
B. Scott Burkett writes a post, Choosing the right methodology, that is worth a read. He proposes that you pick your process (incremental, RUP, agile, waterfall) depending on the circumstances of each project. This builds nicely on the discussion we started in our Foundation series post, Software process (waterfall process […]