 Understand
the Problem
Typically, the test team knows little about the application
to be tested, so the first hurdle is to understand the problem.
This may take some time, and involve reading all available documentation,
talking to business analysts and end-users, and possibly the
technical IT people.
Some applications are inherently time-oriented; examples of
this would be the implementation of a new tax, or anything to
do with insurance policies, because different things happen at
different points in time. Thus the test process must have a way
of setting different dates during the testing; this may simply
be changing the system date on the computer on which the software
is run. However, if that computer has other users, changing the
date may be a bad thing, so this would have to be investigated
to determine the ramifications.
Some applications involve millions of records, making any
kind of batch processing very time-consuming. It may be useful
to have a small subset of the real data that could be used to
speed up overnight billing runs or demographic analysis, for
example. |
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