Course Description | Outline | Business Analysis Home

Course Topics

Introduction

• What is quality?
• What causes quality problems?
• Definition of errors (per IEEE)
• Sources by phase of systems life-cycle
• What are the costs associated with a lack of quality?
• What are the costs associated with having quality?
• DIRFT: Doing It Right The First Time

Systems Life-Cycle Concepts

• Phases
• Costs by phase
• Establishing quality before design and coding
• Defining testable requirements
• Testing the concept-of-operations
• Planning for systems acceptance
• Using CASE technology
• The role of testing and debugging
• Configuration management
• Baseline concept
• Techniques for controlling changes
• Adjusting to changing requirements
• Documentation requirements

Testing Concepts

• Definition
• Economics of testing
• Relating priorities to risks
• Who does what testing
• Monitoring test effectiveness
• Paradox:  purpose vs. commonly used measure of success ("no errors")
• Use of test matrices

Test-Case Design

• Defining specific test objectives
• Black box vs. white box techniques
• Black box techniques
  • Equivalence partitioning
  • Boundary-value analysis
  • Cause-effect graphing
  • Error guessing
• White box techniques
  • Statement coverage
  • Decision coverage
  • Condition coverage
  • Decision/condition coverage
  • Multiple-condition coverage
• Using the techniques together for maximum effectiveness
• Generating test data
• Assembling the test cases into test specifications

Testing Strategies (Discussion of Advantages and Disadvantages)

• Big bang vs. incremental
• Top‑down vs. bottom-up
• Modified top-down
• How strategy affects test-case design
• Error seeding
• Regression Testing
  • Definition
  • Why it is critical
  • When to do it
• Testing prepackaged software

Types of Testing

• Module testing and integration
• Smoke testing
• Procedure testing
• Function testing
• System testing
  • Volume
  • Stress
  • Usability
  • Recovery
  • Sewiceabiiity
  • Etc.
• Acceptance testing
• Installation testing

Creating the Test Plan

• Using a phased approach (affected by strategy employed)
• Contents
  • Test specifications
  • Objectives
  • Completion criteria
  • Schedules/cycles
  • Responsibilities
  • Methods/tools to be used
  • Test-case libraries to be used
  • Standards to be followed
  • Computer resources
  • Tracking procedures and error disposition
  • Debugging procedures
  • Reporting requirements
• Determining test-completion criteria (i.e. knowing when to stop)
• Who is to create the plan?
• When is the plan to be created?

Inspections, Walkthroughs, Types

• The concept of Peer Reviews
• Inspections
• Structured Walkthroughs
• When to use: determination of review milestones and objectives

Debugging

• Problem recognition and identification
• Specifying the problem or defining the deviation
• Searching for distinctions
• Generating possible causes: what's changed?
• Deducing the most probable cause(s)
• Testing for true “cause(s)"

Fixing Errors

• Traps and pitfalls
• How to test fixes
• The role of regression and smoke testing
• Designing changes into existing programs
• Error analysis: a tool for improvement

Getting Better

• Using the test plan
• Developing system metrics
• Monitoring system performance versus system objectives