A Course in Black Box Software Testing
Examples of Specification-Based Testing
See lecture notes on specification-based testing.
Copyright (c) Cem Kaner, 2004
The specification-based tester checks the product's conformance with every statement in one or more reference documents. The documents might be formal specifications, user manuals, advertisements, or even third-party documents.
This course does not cover automated extraction of test ideas from specfications, nor the use of program comprehension tools. Instead, we assume the existence of a natural language specification that is analyzed by a human. The human does such tasks as:
- identifying a set of reference documents
- developing test ideas based on ambiguities or contradictions in the reference documents
- developing lists of items or claims to be tested based on assertions in the reference document, and then associating test ideas with each
- creating traceability matrices that list items or assertions to test, and test cases that tie to those.
The unifying feature of this work is that we start with the reference document and base our tests and testing strategy on what we read in the documents.
The following examples illustrate the use of specification-based tests.
- The Undo Function in Paint Does not Perform as Specified
- OpenOffice Presentation Component's Zoom In Does not Perform as Specified
- File and Folder Naming in WindowsXP
- Creating New Profiles in FireFox
- Deleting Form Information
- Closing Windows with Keyboard Shortcuts
- Incorrect Help Documentation for Math
- Conflict Between the In-Box Manual and Dreamweaver
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.
