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Workroom Productions Paper: The Importance of Data in Functional Testing
The Importance of Data in Functional Testing
Author: Version:
James Lyndsay 1.0
Author Biography
James Lyndsay, Workroom Productions Ltd. James Lyndsay is an independent test consultant with ten years experience. Specialising in test strategy, he has worked in a range of businesses from banking and telecoms to the web, and pays keen attention to the way that his clients' focus is shifting away from functional testing. A system is programmed by its data. Functional testing can suffer if data is poor, and good data can help improve functional testing. Good test data can be structured to improve understanding and testability. Its contents, correctly chosen, can reduce maintenance effort and allow flexibility. Preparation of the data can help to focus the business where requirements are vague. Data, Functional testing
Abstract
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The Importance of Data in Functional Testing © Workroom Productions 2001 1 of 11
Importance of Data in Fn Test Version 1.0
Workroom Productions Paper: The Importance of Data in Functional Testing
The Roles of Data in Functional Testing
Testing consumes and produces large amounts of data. Data describes the initial conditions for a test, forms the input, is the medium through which the tester influences the software. Data is manipulated, extrapolated, summarised and referenced by the functionality under test, which finally spews forth yet more data to be checked against expectations. Data is a crucial part of most functional testing. This paper sets out to illustrate some of the ways that data can influence the test process, and will show that testing can be improved by a careful choice of input data. In doing this, the paper will concentrate most on data-heavy applications; those which use databases or are heavily influenced by the data