Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the development team. You will then have to research additional information in
order to find the number of test points. Specifically, you will need to research
complexity, number of interfaces, and uniformity of components to be tested.
Here complexity refers to the number of conditions (loops, conditional state-
ments, etc., in a function). If a software component consists of many conditions
or conditions with many steps (many loops or conditional statements), then that
component will definitely need to be tested for these large conditions, resulting in
more test cases for testing that component. This translates into a greater volume
of work to be performed. The number of interfaces refers to the number of param-
eters that pass into or out of a function to another function. A greater number
of interfaces means more testing effort, as interfaces are the integration points
between functions, and testing work should include testing of these interfaces to
ensure that data is getting passed from one function to anther correctly. If a soft-
ware application consists of similar functions, then the volume of testing work
gets reduced. On the contrary, if the software application consists of a number of
functions that are very different from each other, the volume of testing work gets
increased substantially. This factor is known as uniformity.
4.2.1.2
Test Strategy
In the contract agreement, the customer should have specified quality require-
ments for the application under test. At the project strategy level, granularity
of test activities must be determined to ensure that these quality standards are
met. These quality standards should also include quality norms at the subsystem/
component level. These norms and standards will determine the thoroughness
of the test activities based on the granularity level required. Also, different qual-
ity parameters to be adhered to will influence the volume of test activities. Test
coverage required for each component is one such factor that greatly influences
volume of work. Test coverage is directly related to intensity of usage of any func-
tion by users. These aspects should be discussed with the customer to arrive at
effort estimation keeping in view of these aspects. Perspectives of different stake-
holders also influence volume of test work. Some functionalities of the appli-
cation under test may be used extensively by a set of users and are considered
critical by them, whereas some other functionalities of the application under test
are seldom used by anyone. Definitely thoroughness and quality of testing will
differ in these two situations, and thus testing effort will be different. It is very
important for the test team to identify such scenarios and estimate their volume
of work accordingly.
4. 2.1. 3
Productivity
In TPA, productivity relates to the time necessary to complete the tasks associated
with one test point. Productivity consists of two components. One is the skill and
