Black box software testing: By Cem Kaner & James Bach

Test documentation and documentation requirements

The test documentation set includes all the documents we create to describe the testing effort. This includes test descriptions, testing project schedules, bug reports, summary reports, etc.

There's a substantial push in our industry for large sets of standardized documents. Perhaps this comes out of the history of the industry as a provider of custom software to huge bureaucracies. Heavyweight (document-intensive) development practices might be appropriate for some types of projects, but they are definitely not appropriate for all. Different organizations will choose a different balance of time to spend on test documentation versus test design, development, execution and interpretation. You can't run all of the possible tests, and you won't have time to create all the doucmentation. To determine what is best for your project, I recommend that you start with a requirements analysis--decide what YOU need, rather than follow what IEEE standard 829 suggests.

This lecture (and slides) introduces one relatively simple form of requirements analysis (evaluation of stakeholders and their interests), along with a series of questions that can help you understand the context of the current project.


We are setting up a mailing list for announcements about this course and, perhaps, a tightly focused and moderated discussion of how to teach it or self-study with it. (This won't be a general, high-traffic, intro-to-testing discussion.) If you're interested in the course, please sign up by sending us an email. We will NOT share your email address with third parties or send commercial advertising to you.

We are publishing this course under a Creative Commons license that allows you to freely reuse and distribute the materials and to modify the slides and associated printable materials (but not the videos). We would be appreciate a few mirror sites, to reduce the growing burden on our servers. If you can help in this way, or any other way, please send a note to Cem Kaner.