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.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 15, 2005
  All that theory is great, but without a practical application none of it matters. Thus Surveyor.
  Surveyor...
• Anonymous
  June 15, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  July 23, 2005
  I’ve recently been reading an article about how to de-couple the various sections of a test case.  I love the idea of being able to write test usable test cases from the very onset of a feature. This framework seems very flexible and usable but for me the
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2006
  One of the areas I'm focusing on these days is cross-feature testing - purposely taking a wide-and-shallow...
• Anonymous
  March 02, 2006
  For any specific feature there are of course an infinite number of possible tests. Humans don't generally...