Credible Sources of Testing Ideas

Any software tester should always look for new ideas for testing. Some useful thoughts may occur while performing testing of a certain web product.

A list below provides the 10 most useful sources of testing ideas that will be helpful when testing dynamic projects or completing separate tasks.

Testing Ideas

1. Available Capabilities

A group of testing ideas that primary is based on capabilities and verification of what a product can or cannot do. Requirements and functional tasks are a good source of your test ideas based on product capabilities.

2. All Possible Failure Patterns

Every testing idea based on the failure pattern is a group of questions like “what if” that may arise from a design of a whole system.

A user can examine all available objects, system graphical interfaces, and wonder, what if something breaks or shows an unexpected result (failure)? Some failure patterns occur as a result of a rigid system constraint or forcibly imposed group (conditions) of the bug demonstration.

3. Web Quality Factors

Factors of web quality are general specifications of a developed system that must obligatorily be in a project under test. It is such a group of things as usability of web structures, network reliability, scalability, and full maintainability. Sometimes test ideas based on web quality factors can include experiments that are entirely devoted to verification of such factors. Actual examples are performance tests, load tests, and stress testing.

4. Usage Scenario

Test ideas based on usage scenarios can help know if a user can achieve necessary objectives with software under test. For example, if we paraphrase the famous inaugural speech of John F. Kennedy, we’ll get the following: no one asks what software gives a user, the question is what a user can do with this software.

Test ideas based on usage scenario have analytics, data on who will use the system, for what reason, and what is the context.

5. Creative Suggestions

Such ideas can be generated by a lot of various sources. For example, recently testers use so-called lateral thinking techniques which help to create effective test suites.

Also, it is worth taking note of metaphors to generate new test ideas. Generally, one can use everything that may introduce new methods and structure of test and user scenarios.

6. Current State

It is a state model that allows generating new ideas while testing software. For example, an X operation is going through several different states at the same time: development, verification, payment, and deletion. You can use state models to test the receiving of new operations, transition from one status to another, and completion of running the entire system stages.

7. Information

Data is an extensive source of new test ideas. You can begin with studying new flows of information, use various data sets, develop them from a combination of unique types of information, and test storage procedure.

8. Environment

Any research for web product behavior in different network environments is a rich source of unique test ideas. A group of such ideas based on the environment can be connected with the process of the variability of OS, hardware, software, third-party programs, and even locales.

9. White Box

A set of test ideas based on a white box strictly appears from reviewing low-level design, program code, and different data schemas. These ideas can include the process of code activation, decision of some functional parts of a program, etc. They can look at the all functional product of developers to find all available methods of testing the software.

10. Taxonomies

Bug taxonomies are an interesting source of new testing ideas. It is some kind of documented collection of bugs. If a bug may occur in an application, you can use some test idea that can detect it.

Of course, it is not the full list of all the places where one can find ideas for writing and performing tests. We got a view of the main and proven sources that will be useful for every software tester.