A Course in Black Box Software Testing
Examples of Scenario Testing
See lecture notes on scenario testing .
Copyright (c) Cem Kaner, 2004
The scenario test involves a story about how the program is used, including information about the motivations of the people involved.
A well-designed scenario has four additional characteristics:
- The story is motivating. A stakeholder with influence would push to fix a program that failed this test.
- The story is credible. It not only could happen in the real world; stakeholders would believe that something like it probably will happen.
- The story involves a complex use of the program or a complex environment or a complex set of data.
- The test results are easy to evaluate. This is valuable for all tests, but is especially important for scenarios because they are complex.
The following examples illustrate the application of this style of analysis.
- Internet Explorer Does not Display PDF Files in Some Cases Even if Adobe Reader is Present
- Misleading Error Message in Eclipse
- Data Loss with Themes in FireFox
- Corrupted Pictures in Paint
- Tab Information Lost with Bad Addresses
- Using FireFox's Download Manager
- Find and Replace Scope Bug in ThunderBird
- SWBS Error in OpenOffice.org Math
- Evaluating Mozilla's Shortcut Commands
Copyright (c) Cem Kaner 2004
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
These notes are partially based on research that was supported by NSF Grant EIA-0113539 ITR/SY+PE: "Improving the Education of Software Testers." Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
