Pragmatic Software Testing: Becoming an Effective and Efficient Test Professional

Chapter 11. Equivalence Classes and Boundary Values Exercise

It’s time to apply the equivalence class partitioning and boundary value analysis techniques to the Omninet project. Let’s start with functional testing and then move on to nonfunctional test areas.

Functional Boundaries and Classes

You are testing an e-commerce system that sells Omninet knickknacks like baseball caps and jackets. The exercise is to create functional tests for the web page that accepts the orders. A screen prototype for the order-entry web page is shown in Figure 11-1.

Figure 11-1. Omninet e-commerce order entry page screen template

The system accepts a five-digit numeric item ID number from 00000 to 99999. In the product catalog in the system database, these item IDs are sorted by price, with the cheapest items having the lower (closest to 00000) item ID numbers and the most expensive items having the higher (closest to 99999) item ID numbers. You don’t have to worry about testing the sorting of data in the database, though, as you are not testing the data-entry process for the catalog.

The system accepts a quantity to be ordered, from 1 to 99. If the user enters a previously ordered item ID and a 0 quantity to be ordered, that item is removed from the shopping cart.

Based on these inputs, the system retrieves the item price, calculates the item total (quantity times item price), and adds the item total to the ...