If you are a Product Manager or Business Analyst in charge of managing users through User Acceptance Testing (UAT), here are the top 10 things to do to prepare: Formal scripts – prepare formal scripts for the business users to run. If you can re-use any of QA’s scripts, all the better. At a minimum, [...]
Title: How to Use Business Data Diagrams to Derive Use Cases and UAT Scenarios Summary: Most Business Analysts have at least a passing familiarity with Entity Relationship Diagrams, or ERD’s, and their use by DBAs and Data Architects to model logical and physical data models. One level of abstraction above the ERD is the Business [...]
Many of my fellow colleagues on this here blog have already commented on the value of the Business Data Diagram or BDD. Those of you familiar with ERDsor Entity Relationship Diagrams should recognize the BDD. The key difference between the ERD and the BDD is that BDDs are not intended to represent either the logical [...]
For the purpose of this discussion, let me define data defects in a software development process as defects caused when improper data setup manifests itself as “application errors.” I ran into this situation recently when I was asked to define requirements to fix a couple of defects that had been logged in the system by [...]
“Karl – how’s testing going on Project Zeta?”“Not too good, Michael. I can’t figure out which features have been implemented, it looks like several key requirements have changed but I don’t know what the new details are, and I have a whole slew of untestable requirements.”“Some of those ‘the system shall be available for 99.9% [...]
You’re near the end of a long requirements phase, you’ve been working 60+ hours a week, and the project manager is pressuring you to deliver a final deliverable. So you do a quick spell check and proof read, and then toss it over for final review to business, development, test, etc. Hang on a second, [...]
In my last post, I explained the difference between validation and verification. In this post, I’ll further explain validation and provide some best practices. To ensure that requirements validation goes smoothly, the following questions should be posed: Are all requirements necessary and sufficient? Do lower level detailed requirements meet the objectives of higher level requirements [...]
In software development, validation and verification are key elements to a successful project, but often the terms are mis-understood. Per the CMMI guidelines, validation is used to demonstrate that the product will meet it’s intended use, and verification demonstrates that the product matches the specified requirements. Validation ensures that you “built the right thing” and [...]
How often should I be reviewing my requirements with members of my project team? By requirements I mean everything from high-level business needs (e.g. stakeholder requests, business requirements, vision and problem statements) to the most granular requirements (aka shall statements, functional and supplementary requirements and the like). My answer (with only the slightest bit of [...]
A good project team relies on many kinds of testing to help ensure a high-quality release. Developers use unit and integration tests to verify functionality of their individual modules. Quality assurance personnel use performance and reliability testing to verify service levels of the system as a whole. While each of these techniques serves a unique [...]
