Activity:  Identify Test Ideas

Identify relevant Test Motivators and Target Test Items

Using the Iteration Test Plan, review the Test Motivators. Motivation may come from one of any number of sources: an individual artifact, a set of artifacts, an event or activity, or the absence of any of these things. Sources might include: Risk List, Change Requests, Use Cases, other Requirements artifacts, UML Models etc.

It is insufficient for a Test-Ideas List to contain a single entry that refers to validating a single source requirement. That should certainly be one entry on the list, but a a well-formed Test-Ideas List attempts to advise about quality for a given Target Test Item on many other dimensions in addition to validating compliance with specification.

Examine relevant available Test-Idea Catalogs

Use any available Test-Idea Catalogs or other established guidelines to identify initial ideas for the tests.

Brainstorm additional Test Ideas

Encourage other test team members to contribute additional test ideas—Consider doing this informally over a "brown bag" lunch. To stimulate the session, you might read selected excerpts from testing journals, published books or relevant mail from test community mail lists.

While this is a generally a useful thing to do, it's especially useful and important in situations where there are no existing Test-Idea Catalogs to reference. See the More Information: section in the header table of this page for further guidelines on brainstorming and idea reduction.

List candidate Test Ideas

For each combination of Test Motivator and Target Test Item, List the Test Ideas that are potential candidates.

Refine the Test-Ideas List

It's worth getting a broader sampling of feedback. Show your list to interested development staff, customer representatives and other stakeholders who might have further ideas to add.

At this stage it's generally better to have too many ideas than too few. Simply refine the list by adding any additional entries, and remove any entries that are obviously duplicates.

Maintain traceability relationships

Using the Traceability requirements outlined in the Test Plan, update the traceability relationships as required.

Evaluate and verify your results

Now that you have completed the work, it is beneficial to verify that the work was of sufficient value, and that you did not simply consume vast quantities of paper. You should evaluate whether your work is of appropriate quality, and that it is complete enough to be useful to those team members who will make subsequent use of it as input to their work. Where possible, use the checklists provided in RUP to verify that quality and completeness are "good enough".

Have the people performing the downstream activities that rely on your work as input take part in reviewing your interim work. Do this while you still have time available to take action to address their concerns. You should also evaluate your work against the key input artifacts to make sure you have represented them accurately and sufficiently. It may be useful to have the author of the input artifact review your work on this basis.

Try to remember that that RUP is an iterative process and that in many cases artifacts evolve over time. As such, it is not usually necessary—and is often counterproductive—to fully-form an artifact that will only be partially used or will not be used at all in immediately subsequent work. This is because there is a high probability that the situation surrounding the artifact will change—and the assumptions made when the artifact was created proven incorrect—before the artifact is used, resulting in wasted effort and costly rework. Also avoid the trap of spending too many cycles on presentation to the detriment of content value. In project environments where presentation has importance and economic value as a project deliverable, you might want to consider using an administrative resource to perform presentation tasks.

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