Gian Franco wrote:
but what artifacts did the team in your example make more consistent?
Gian
Lance Zant wrote:
In my experience, tests identified by business product owners' tend to be indicative rather than exhaustive. They tend to come up with a sunny day case and stop there. Prodded for error cases, they give me a couple of obvious missing or bad values. A second round of prodding may or may not produce a couple of interaction exceptions (no cash refund for a credit purchase), but it definitely begins to raise the frustration level. ("I just need it to work, dammit!") Unfortunately, when a subtle interaction bug arises, the fact that there was no test for that combination is cold comfort, and the blame game begins. ("Of COURSE, we need to process payments against canceled orders!")
So the question is, how do you assess the adequacy of your business-facing tests, if it's not based on some kind of coverage of the possible input combinations and sequences? If the answer is "heuristically", fair enough. The follow up in that case is whether any of the heuristics are general across projects and domains, and how do you get the business types to really engage them?