Discovering and Testing Requirements Through Scenarios-Based Development and Testing

(CSTP #5) or (CTM Elective) or (CSTAS Elective)

This course covers area 5 of the Test Professional Body of Knowledge requirements. This course also covers the Elective area for the Certified Test Manager (CTM) and the CSTAS certification.

For costs and cities where this course might be offered, please see the right border of this page or to bring this course to your test team at your location, contact our Education and Professionals Services Group.

Concepts

It should not be a surprise to any of us to know that the quality of software releases is only as good as the quality of requirements and the quality of test design. No matter how much we try and how much time we spend on writing requirements, no matter how skilled our business analysts and requirement engineers are in writing requirements, requirements always remain incomplete, imprecise, ambiguous and of course, potentially not testable. Although requirement reviews will always help clarify issues with requirements and fill in some of the gaps in requirements, developers and testers usually end up with somewhat high level, incomplete and vague requirements. More and more details are always derived during the development process. Many assumptions are made by developers during the development process and they are rarely shared with testers or even validated by business. Many changes and adjustments are also made during the development process, which are also rarely shared with the test team. This is true whether the project is using a traditional waterfall model or an agile process. 

The Result

As a result of all the above, there is always major gap between what has been implemented, what has been documented, and what has been tested. Testers are never able to test all that is in the code, which of course causes very low code coverage. This is evident from all the bug reports we receive from productions which mainly expose scenarios that have never been tested.

The Solution

Based on his 25 years implanting and teaching Scenario-Based Development and Testing SBDT™) to organizations around the globe, Dr. Hanna will share his passion about this process that he has been proven to cause major reduction in the number of defects found by the test team and customers as well as major increase in code coverage.

Outline

• The problem with Requirement-Based Development and Testing
• The SBDT™ process
• Developing scenario  from vague requirement statements
• Developing scenario from user interface
• Using formal models to produce scenarios
• Using Use Cases to produce scenarios
• Documenting and maintaining scenarios
• Developing formal test cases and exploratory tests from scenarios