Test Guide

From Accountant To Scientist

In many of my posts I have alluded to the automation stack my team is building, but I have not provided any details. The next month or so of posts will remedy that: first I'll discuss the problems we are trying to solve and then I'll explain how we're going about doing that.

Those of you doing model-based testing will likely note that you don't have some of the problems I talk about. While I don't disagree I do think that many of these problems simply move into the model's implementation.

Many thanks to everyone who reviewed the whitepapers on which these posts are based: Adam, Chan, Bob, Scott, Cathy, Ross, and most especially Mike.

Test Cases Today Are Not Everything They Could Be

• Execution And Verification Are Tightly Coupled
• Multiple Paths Of Execution Cause Duplicated Verification
• Most Of Each Test Case Exercises A Small Fraction Of The Code
• Test Cases Have Intimate Knowledge Of The User Interface
• Test Cases Are Maintenance Hogs
• Test Is Back-Loaded
• Testers Are Little More Than Accountants In A Factory

So What Should A Test Case Look Like?

Please Allow Us To Introduce Ourselves

• It All Starts With User Features: The Logical Functional Model
• One Method To Rule Them All: Execution Behavior Manager
• How High? For How Long? Using Which Foot? Data Manager
• Did You? Did You Really? Loosely Coupled Comprehensive Verification
• Show Me Yours: Application Internals
• How Do I Invoke Thee? Let Me Count The Ways: The Physical Object Model

All For One And One For All: Our Complete Automation Stack

Examples of doing all this for a simple application:

• Nuts And Bolts - Introduction
• Use Your Users' Viewpoint - Logical Functional Model
• Who Ya Gonna Call? - Execution Behaviors
• A Peek Behind The Curtains - Physical Object Model
• No Guts, But Lots Of Glory - Controls abstraction layer
• Verily, 'Tis Truth - Loosely Coupled Comprehensive Verification

*** Comments, questions, feedback? Want a fun job on a great team? I need a tester! Send two coding samples and an explanation of why you chose them, and of course your resume, to me at michhu at microsoft dot com. Great coding skills required.

Published Wednesday, May 04, 2005 9:30 AM by micahel