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Monday, March 16, 2009

Questions regarding software testing and functionality

A couple of questions related to software testing, especially with regard to functionality ..

What if the application has functionality that wasn't in the requirements?
One might wonder how it is possible to have a situation where the application has functionality that was not in the requirements; but it is possible. In a badly controlled software project, it is possible that functionality may be included based on direct request from clients; another case is when the project has been partly done by another company or is a migration project. In such cases, the software may have many undocumented functionality. The implications of such functionality are related to the extra effort required for testing, for documentation, for bug fixing, for internationalization.
Given the impact, it is necessary to do the serious effort needed to determine if an application has significant unexpected or hidden functionality, and the very fact that it may be necessary to do this analysis indicates problems in the software development process. What do you do if such functionality is found? If the functionality isn't necessary to the purpose of the application, a decision should be taken to determine whether it should be removed, as it may have unknown impacts or dependencies that were not taken into account by the designer or the customer.
If not removed, analysis needs to be done to determine added testing needs or regression testing needs (and such extra effort may be non-trivial, or may add to the overall risks). Management should be made aware of any significant added risks as a result of the unexpected functionality. If the functionality only effects areas such as minor improvements in the user interface, for example, it may not be a significant risk. However, in no case should such functionality be taken casually.

What if the software is so buggy it can't really be tested at all?
One would not like to be in such a situation, but can happen easily enough. Suppose the software cycle has been under a lot of stress in the design and development phase, then code can be real buggy. Further, if the processes related to review and code standards are not implemented, then the software could be real buggy. What does QE do in this case, given that they still need to do their job and complete testing.
The best bet in this situation is for the testers to go through the process of reporting whatever bugs or blocking-type problems initially show up, with the focus being on critical bugs. Since this type of problem can severely affect schedules, and indicates deeper problems in the software development process (such as insufficient unit testing or insufficient integration testing, poor design, improper build or release procedures, etc.) managers should be notified, and provided with some documentation as evidence of the problem. If required, development could be tasked with only bug fixing and no new feature work until a situation is reached where the code is much more bug free; and schedules can also be extended.


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