Taking Testing Seriously

CHAPTER 10Working with Quality Characteristics

—By Rikard Edgren, Henrik Emilsson, and Martin Jansson

Soon after the millennium shift, we—Henrik, Martin, and Rikard—joined forces at a growing start-up company in Gothenburg, Sweden (Spotfire). We were a group of ambitious testers who had the freedom to experiment with how we tested, and that we did. Each lunch, we discussed testing, including what we could test and how, and we earned respect among the developers, as the information we provided was valuable to them.

One day, we discovered Cem Kaner's article “The Ongoing Revolution in Software Testing.” We were excited, realizing, “Here is someone who thinks like us!”

The discovery continued, and we soon found that the written material that suited us best was coming from the context-driven school of testing. James Bach's Heuristic Test Strategy Model (HTSM)¹ became an important document that helped us think better and more broadly about our testing.

The SFDIPOT mnemonic—which stands for Structure, Functions, Data, Interfaces, Platform, Operations, and Time—might be the best part of the HTSM, but we made most use of the Quality Criteria page: No matter what we tested, that list helped us come up with more and better test ideas.

After some time, we started adding items to the list, including quality words that were important in our context but, at the same time, generic enough to be useful to others.

As the number of subcategories increased, we felt this was turning into something ...