Testing Complex Applications - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 237

The network connectivity is simple peer-to-peer, another way of saying that
each workstation does the same business tasks even though certain designated
workstations house the master fi le of all completion certifi cates. The interworkstation
communication is strictly to aggregate new certifi cate records weekly and store them
in one place for later searching and archiving. As a point of review, Figure 14.3
shows the testing strategy chessboard that we used for our Case Study B 1-tier test
planning and execution.

Tier 1 workstation functionality:

Application
under devel

Log on/log off
Menus
Data entry
Data storage
Business rules
Data display
Reporting
Backups
Archiving

Connectivity

Data
resources

Security

Operating
system

Prelim
analysis
and design

Prelim
construction

Final
construction

Ship or
Install

Postimplement

Figure 14.3 Test strategy example for a simple 1-tier application

Recall that the test planning started at the top layer in the tier and went down as
needed into the support layers. Then the test execution started at the bottom layer in
the tier and went up to confi rm that each successive layer could deliver the required
cumulative support functionality.
The bottom-line is that you have seen how to plan and test 1-tier applications.
We now add a tier to the application complexity and the test planning.

14.3 2-TIER APPLICATIONS

The classic example of a 2-tier application is any client/server application. Figure 14.4
shows a typical client/server architecture.
The main difference between Figure 14.2 and Figure 14.4 is that there are two
distinctly different groups of computers with distinctly different tasks. A useful
approach is to fi rst consider developing a separate testing strategy chessboard for