Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Most of the test requirements can be deduced from the software requirement speci-
fications documents. In the test case design phase, both manual and automated test
cases are identified and generated. If you are using any keyword-driven automation
framework, then in the design phase you also develop the keyword library. In the
test script development phase, automated test scripts are generated using either the
automated test tool or manually programming or a combination of both. The test
execution phase involves executing both manual and automated test cases. The test
result analysis and documentation phase involves analyzing the result and report-
ing the defects. In fact, if the number of test cases is not huge, then the test case
execution phase and test result analysis phase can be combined.
The objective of identifying different life cycles is to estimate size and effort for
each phase and document the estimation assumption for each phase. Later on, the
team can work back on the estimation for variation in estimation.
4.3.2
Identify Activities for Each Phase
The main focus of this activity is to identify the activities involved in each phase of
the test life cycle. The job of the testing team is to estimate the size of the activities
in terms of man-hours. During each test phase activities will result in documents
for that phase. So we will have test planning and strategy documents after the test
requirements phase, test and scenario cases and keywords after the test case genera-
tion phase, automation scripts after the test automation phase, and a test log after
the test analysis phase.
4.3.3
Size Estimation for Each Phase
The main focus of this activity is to estimate the size of the activities for each phase.
While estimating the size for each phase, all the assumptions considered during
estimation should be documented for future analysis if any variation in estimation
exists. The Wide Band Size Estimation technique can be used to do size estimation
for each phase. Also the Historical Project Database can be made available to the
testing team as a reference depending on the project scope and nature. Size estima-
tion for each phase is detailed below.
4.3.3.1
Test Requirement Phase
In this phase we estimate the number of scenarios required from analyzing the proj-
ect requirement and identifying the number of scenarios required based on the test
strategy. The testing team should brainstorm the project requirement and catego-
rize the test requirement. The Wide Band Delphi Technique (a heuristic approach
to effort estimation where different estimates from different people for the same
task are averaged out to make a single final estimate) can be used to estimate the
number of test requirements.
