Lessons Learned in Software Testing: A Context-Driven Approach

Chapter 6. Documenting Testing

We wrote this chapter to help you explore your requirements for test documentation. We don't provide sample documents. (See Chapter 3, Testing Techniques, for examples of tables and matrices.) Instead, we provide questions that might help you decide what you need.

This chapter starts out with a detailed evaluation of IEEE Standard 829 on Software Testing Documentation. We realize that you might never have read or even heard of this Standard—the IEEE sells the standard at a price high enough to probably dissuade most individuals from buying a copy^[16] We've met very few people who have their own copy of Standard 829. Not many of our client or employer companies have bought IEEE standards either. However, many of the test documentation templates that float around the field are derived from Standard 829. So, even though you may not know it by its name, if you've been in the field for a while, you've probably run into Standard 829.

If you haven't encountered Standard 829 and are not interested in test documentation templates, we suggest that you skip ahead to Lesson 147: Analyze your requirements before deciding what products to build; this applies as much to your documentation as to your software.

The most recent document promoting Standard 829 is the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, which we discuss here.

We quoted the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK Version 0.95, 2001) in the preface. We'll have more to say about it in Chapter 10