Testing Strategy - Software Testing: Testing Across the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - page 76

Workstations are those computers that end users and customers and
employees use to accomplish work. These computers normally have some kind
of human interface like a keyboard, touch pad, display screen, microphone, or
speaker. Examples of workstation platforms are personal computers, palmpilots,
cellphones and Blackberrys. New workstation devices are appearing in the mar-
ket that combine features of existing workstations and add new features, like
the cellphone that has a keyboard for e-mail and a display screen for streaming
video.
Networks are those computers and connectivity equipment (wires and wireless
broadcast) that permit the communication among workstations and servers and
other workstations. Examples of network platforms are local area networks within
one building or across a complex of adjacent buildings. Wide area networks
connect computers in different geographies on the same continent and on differ-
ent continents. Satellites are similar to wide area networks in geographical reach
but do not require the physical cabling from point to point that wide area networks
require; rather, they rely on a group of earth orbiting satellites to hop continents
and oceans.
Servers are the business computer workhorses. Over time these work-
horses have become specialized in the business services they provide. There are
application servers that provide the daily business functionality like ordering,
purchasing, fulfi llment, billing, and accounting. There are database servers that
organize, store, and, retrieve business records for customers, services, parts and
supplies, equipment, music, or art. There are security servers that limit what an
employee or a customer can do with company data, depending on that customer's
contract status or that employee's job responsibilities. There are telephony servers
that answer phones and with appropriate responses from the caller, can route
calls to appropriate customer, service representatives. There are Web site servers
that provide all the home page services necessary for a company to do business
on the Internet. There are fi rewalls that protect company data from unauthorized
access or updates from outside the company walls, usually via networks or the
Internet.
IT professionals who remember working on the giant mainframe computers of
the 1970s and 1980s often look for a fourth category called either “mainframes”
or “host systems.” The computers that would have been correctly placed in those
categories in the 1980s are now being placed in the “servers” category. As compa-
nies have moved into the e-business arena, they have discovered that the ubiquitous
mainframe is best utilized as an incredibly powerful and reliable multi-server, not a
stand-alone monolith as in the past.
e-business requires many computers from all three categories of platforms. So,
instead of requiring just one grid of testing decisions, the testing teams must consider
three strategy grids, one for each platform involved. The expanded testing strategy
chess board is shown in Figure 4.4.
The complex task of planning the testing strategy for these multiplatform
applications can now be simplifi ed to a familiar two-dimensional testing strategy