Managing the Testing Process: Practical Tools and Techniques for Managing Hardware and Software Testing

5.5. Case Study

On the loan processing application project discussed in the case studies in Chapters 2 and 4, it was very important to ensure that various specific conditions were evaluated. Banks have lots of business rules about who can and can't get a loan, as well as being heavily regulated by individual states and the United States Federal government. Failure to test all these conditions could have resulted in situations such as making loans to bankrupt or unemployed applicants, getting sued for not being able to prove a legitimate business reason for denying a loan to an applicant, and so forth. Therefore, the test team built an Access database to keep track of all these conditions, and to trace the conditions back to specific test cases that covered them. The case study test coverage tracking database, "Case Study Loan Processing Test Coverage Tracking.mdb," is available at www.rexblackconsulting.com.

This database contains two tables, TestCases and TestConditions, with a one-to-many relationship between the two based on the "Sequence" field, which was one unique test case identifier (see Figure 5.20). The tests were built to cover all the conditions. Various queries exist in the database to check that all conditions were covered, to verify that most test cases mapped to a condition, to identify the test cases that covered particularly high-risk conditions, and so forth. This database could easily be extended with result and bug tracking information, which would then allow ...