There have been times when I’ve received “finished” programs from developers which didn’t even run! Obviously the code had never been tested, at least not in any meaningful way.

The standards apply testing, while the specifications apply to the specific program or system.

You also cannot make a hundred thousand copies of a product and send it out to tens of thousands of beta testers without a clearset of goals, expert supervision and constant management and expect to get anything meaningful back.Marketing is an essential part of a product plan, but it has absolutely no place in the testing plan. What are some of the common testing mistakes?

Testing needs to hit a program hard, right between the eyes. Trying to prove a program does not work Again, the purpose of testing is to test, not to prove anything. You should always have a well defined testing plan and follow that plan.

By the time a project is implemented (much less tested) you should completely know how it will perform (minus the possibility of bad programming, which is a different problem which testing is designed to uncover).Testing will, however, validate that the product does perform as indicated in the specifications. Come on people, how can you test something if you don’t have a plan? What are you trying to prove?

How can a programmer test his or her own code? First of all, programmers make lousy testers testing is a field all to itself and programmers are almost never trained well in this area. Second, the developers of a system have a conflict of interest – they want their software to work. Testers need to approach with a more open mind.

Testing without a goal. If you don’t have a goal in mind for your testing, you don’t know when you are done. What are you trying to accomplish? Without these things beta testing is simply a numbers game which does nothing useful at all.

Testing is not the appropriate time to make design decisions. Don’t send out a poorly defined “beta test” to a hundred thousand people and try and get their opinions on features. The only thing you are going to accomplish is to get yourself slammed in the media. Richard Lowe Jr. is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets at http://www.internet-tips.net. So how is good testing done?

It was also very buggy and required an immense amount of support during the first couple of years of it’s life cycle.

A well trained analyst understands that the marketing department is a customer and must be included in the analysis phase of the project.

What does this really mean? It simply means that changes to the design are only allowed during the analysis and design phase. Period. If your customer changes anything at all after the analysis and design, you must reanalyze, redesign and renegotiate – always and without fail.

Let’s say you are the contractor who has been hired to create a new warehouse system. You do your analysis and design and it is approved by the customer. You now have a contract and it is important that your customer understands this from the beginning. Okay, you begin the project and your customer decides he wants to add bar coding.

Testing measures the implementation against the specifications and standards. Standards should be made known to the customer as part of the entire package. These might include things like all fields will be validated in specific ways, all buffers will not overflow, screens will have a certain look and so on.

Remember the purpose of testing. Testing should prove the implementation meets everything included in the specifications and standards.

Testing does NOT mean the product is measured against customer expectations (that’s a marketing function which should have been nailed down during the analysis and design phase). You see, the specification MUST meet the customer expectations before implementation beings. Then the final product WILL meet customer expectations as the specification is the expectation.

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