The Puzzle Pieces of Good Testing
We can think of the software delivery style as setting us up for various kinds of risks. These could be simple bugs, strange bugs hidden in rare combinations of the software, performance and security problems, and anything in between. The delivery cycle might give us one opportunity to check things out before burning the software into a chip on a video game cartridge, or we might be able to update the software in seconds while maintaining uptime. This context of our work will indicate what pieces we need to assemble – and how to assemble them – to do good testing work.
A test case is not one of those primitives.
It is easy enough to rail against the test case as a structure, as a set of instructions on what to test along with an expected result. We see test cases as low value, yet people often fight for them. To the project manager, they give a sense of progress – looking at passing, failing, and percent complete, the project...
