Last updated: April 28, 2006
Software Test Specification
General Documentation Issues
-
Documents need to have a clear organization with major sections numbered and titled
-
When writing your Test Specification use terminology and references that are consistent with terminology and references used in the requirements, design, and code.
-
Review your Test Specification to ensure that it accurately reflects how you plan to test your product.
-
Although we are not expecting professionally formatted documents, spending a little time structuring the document for readability will be appreciated. Try to do some minimal formatting of your document's layout. Include white space, have consistent line lengths, etc.
-
Make diagrams neat and legible.
-
Spell check the document and read it over for correct grammar.
Annotated Outline
Title Page
Table of Contents
Revision History
Introduction (Section 1 of the document)
-
Purpose of the document
-
References & Applicable Documents
-
Definition & Terms
Test Strategy (Section 2 of the document)
-
Describe the overall testing strategy you will use to achieve effective testing of your product. In the context of this course we consider testing to be any activity that is used to evaluate the product. Therefore testing explicitly includes technical reviews, code walkthroughs, and prototype evaluations. The more conventional view of test is associated with things you do to execute your product and determine if it produced the expected results. Generally, testing is performed at several levels, including unit, integration, and system levels. Your testing strategy should make it clear how various approaches and levels of testing are performed in a way that will achieve your product quality goals.
Testing Environment and Tools (Section 3 of the document)
-
Describe the testing environment and tools that will be used to implement and manage the test strategy.
-
Automating the execution of testing is highly desirable. Significant effort can be required to automate your testing, however, an automated test suite is more efficient to run and will produce more consistent results than can be achieved through manual testing alone. In this section describe the extent to which automation will be employed and identify how automation will be accomplished.
Test Cases (Section 4 of document)
-
Assign a unique identifier to each test case.
-
Provide a short description of each test case sufficient to identify the purpose and intent of the test case.
-
Provide sufficient information for each test case to enable someone else to accurately perform the test case and determine if the desired results were obtained.
