3 Ways Testers Can Model Your Product Or Service That Helps Them Decide What Will Be Tested And What Will Not.
What's all this about?
I hope this works!
I'm going to talk about that feeling of trepidation you get when a release goes Live and you're not sure how it was tested! When it could go either way. Will it be rapturous applause or... alerts going off like crazy or even worse, not going off while something silently fails for hours, days or weeks! Help the tester in your life communicate the work they did so you can rest easier!
Think people, technology and business.
The People.
Who is using the product and why?
Consider what your customers or users are doing, why they're doing it and how. These techniques could be useful:
Examples.
User journeys.
Workflows.
BDD.
What you're looking for are rich and varied ways of understanding the app from the point of view of the customer.
The Technology.
What is the product or service made of?
What components is the product made from? How are they connected? Some modelling and visualisation techniques are:
Architecture diagrams.
DB schema.
Sequence diagram.
Being able to understand the building blocks of the system, which parts talk to what and how data moves around it, helps us understand how a feature will be implemented.
The Business.
How does all this make us money?
There are many different angles to this:
Value chain maps.
Business process diagrams.
BDD.
Analytics
Knowing where and how the business makes money enables us to create tests to make sure those things keep working!
Make the thinking visible.
Knowledge work is intangible.
Testing isn't the clicking of the buttons, pass/fail metrics or bug reports. They're just the most visible aspects. Testing is the thinking behind those things. Like all knowledge work, it can be difficult to perceive. By making reasoning visible as well as the traditional artefacts, it allows you and your team to challenge, question and improve the testing being done by your team. Remember though, this isn't about telling the testers how to work.
It's about helping testers challenge their own thinking, so they can give you the information that you need!