Software Testing Life Cycle

Software Testing Life Cycle:

The test development life cycle contains the following components:

Requirements
Use Case Document
Test Plan
Test Case
Test Case execution
Report Analysis
Bug Analysis
Bug Reporting

Typical interaction scenario from a user's perspective for system requirements studies or testing. In other words, "an actual or realistic example scenario". A use case describes the use of a system from start to finish. Use cases focus attention on aspects of a system useful to people outside of the system itself.

Users of a program are called users or clients.
Users of an enterprise are called customers, suppliers, etc.

Use Case:

A collection of possible scenarios between the system under discussion and external actors, characterized by the goal the primary actor has toward the system's declared responsibilities, showing how the primary actor's goal might be delivered or might fail.

Use cases are goals (use cases and goals are used interchangeably) that are made up of scenarios. Scenarios consist of a sequence of steps to achieve the goal, each step in a scenario is a sub (or mini) goal of the use case. As such each sub goal represents either another use case (subordinate use case) or an autonomous action that is at the lowest level desired by our use case decomposition.

This hierarchical relationship is needed to properly model the requirements of a system being developed. A complete use case analysis requires several levels. In addition the level at which the use case is operating at it is important to understand the scope it is addressing. The level and scope are important to assure that the language and granularity of scenario steps remain consistent within the use case.

There are two scopes that use cases are written from: Strategic and System. There are also three levels: Summary, User and Sub-function.

Scopes: Strategic and System

Strategic Scope:

The goal (Use Case) is a strategic goal with respect to the system. These goals are goals of value to the organization. The use case shows how the system is used to benefit the organization.,/p> These strategic use cases will eventually use some of the same lower level (subordinate) use cases.

System Scope:

Use cases at system scope are bounded by the system under development. The goals represent specific functionality required of the system. The majority of the use cases are at system scope. These use cases are often steps in strategic level use cases

Levels: Summary Goal , User Goal and Sub-function.

Sub-function Level Use Case:

A sub goal or step is below the main level of interest to the user. Examples are "logging in" and "locate a device in a DB". Always at System Scope.

User Level Use Case:

This is the level of greatest interest. It represents a user task or elementary business process. A user level goal addresses the question "Does your job performance depend on how many of these you do in a day". For example "Create Site View" or "Create New Device" would be user level goals but "Log In to System" would not. Always at System Scope.

Summary Level Use Case:

Written for either strategic or system scope. They represent collections of User Level Goals. For example summary goal "Configure Data Base" might include as a step, user level goal "Add Device to database". Either at System of Strategic Scope.

Test Documentation

Test documentation is a required tool for managing and maintaining the testing process. Documents produced by testers should answer the following questions:

What to test? Test Plan
How to test? Test Specification
What are the results? Test Results Analysis Report

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